Martine van der Pluijm

53 Activities and strategies – a review of empirical interventions may result in learning new words. Reese et al. (2010a) provide an example of how strategies and activities are intrinsically related in interventions for lower-educated parents. The researchers emphasize the use of questions as a strategy that directs parents to connect to the child’s experiences by talking about past events and by evoking decontextualized language. Our third conclusion states that the mode of delivery for lower-educated parents is most effective when it is flexible and is adapted to the families’ specific backgrounds and personal experiences, especially when the intervention is tailored to activities that occur in the families’ homes. Examples include daily activities such as having dinner, trips to school, and buying groceries. These findings are in line with previous research that emphasized the need to connect closely to the specific social environment of target populations (Hart & Risley, 1999; Korat, 2001; Roggman, Boyce, & Innocenti, 2008). Lower-educated parents are likely to be familiar with such activities, and this could positively affect the effectiveness of interventions (Jacobson, Degener, & Purcell-Gates, 2003), whereas an activity such as shared reading is probably unfamiliar to many lower-educated parents (Yarosz & Barnett, 2001). Familiarity with the activity contributes to parents’ confidence, which is an important prerequisite for successfully using the targeted strategies. An effective ingredient of adaptive interventions to family backgrounds and activities could be that it helps to prevent transfer problems that are often encountered (Manz et al., 2010). If parents learn to use the strategies in a family situation, for instance by talking about the child’s favorite dishes, the parent can likely repeat these strategies in the same activity at home (“All right, tell me more about what you really like most? When did we eat that? On what occasion?”). In addition, using strategies adapted to daily family activities prevents parents from spending extra time on top of their busy schedules. The fact that the implementation of activities and strategies is less time consuming for the parents might help to break barriers for change (De la Rie et al., 2016). Remarkably, none of the studies into shared reading and read and write activities used flexible activities that were adapted to the social environment of families’ homes. Using printed materials that are normally present in family life can enable lower-educated parents and children to practice reading and writing. Ethnographic studies show that all families use print to some extent, but the frequency and quality of the print and the way it is used varies (Purcell-Gates, 1996; Teale, 1986). Examples are the labels of groceries, the subtitles of television programs, religious sources, and local papers or advertisements that people receive at home. More modern examples include computer games and social media. Outside their homes, all families make use of print, for example, when looking at the metro timetable or at the names of shops. The presence of these types of materials and the way they are used are related to children’s emergent literacy skills (Purcell-Gates, 1996; Purcell-Gates, L’Allier, & Smith, 1995).