Development of Shared Book Reading Intervention for Children with Language Disorder

Shared book reading (SBR) has been shown to support a wide range of early language skills, including vocabulary, narrative and conversation abilities, print awareness, phonological awareness, and future reading development, with the affective quality of interactions playing a vital role in fostering children’s interest in literacy and language learning. Although SBR is emerging as a promising language stimulation technique in speech-language pathology, research in India remains limited, with most studies focusing on parental attitudes, beliefs, or maternal interactions among typically developing children. Evidence on SBR as an intervention strategy for children with language disorders is lacking, despite its potential to address language delays and reduce the risk of specific learning disorder by establishing strong foundations for language and emergent literacy skills. To the best of the researcher’s knowledge, no shared reading intervention has been reported for children with language disorders in India. The present study therefore aims to develop and test the efficacy and examine the social validity of a shared book reading intervention module. The study will be conducted in three phases. Phase 1 will involve developing and validating an intervention module using a Delphi survey with 20 experts in child language disorders, shared reading, or emergent literacy; Phase 2 will test the efficacy of the module with 30 parent–child dyads (3–5 years) divided into intervention and control groups, with pre- and post-assessments including ACIRI, ProBEL, book-specific vocabulary testing, and a parental perspectives questionnaire; and Phase 3 will adapt and administer the Social Validity Questionnaire (Justice et al., 2011) in Malayalam to evaluate parental perceptions. The hypothesis tested will be 1) there is no significant difference in the use of SBR strategies by the parents or the child’s participation in SBR between the intervention group and control group and 2) there is no significant difference in the children’s vocabulary or emergent literacy skills between the intervention group and control group. The intervention will be provided twice weekly for six weeks, and reassessments will follow. Young children with language disorder may be helped to catch up in their language and emergent literacy development by using shared book reading as an intervention technique. SBR intervention helps to reduce the risk of developing specific learning disorder as shared reading lays a strong foundation for emergent literacy skills