Page 18 - The Inquiry into the Development and Implementation of a Multimedia Resource to Help Improve Parental Involvement in Their Child’s Reading Literacy During the Primary School Years.

increased confidence in their parenting skills and an interest in their own education;

whilst for teachers, an improvement in parent-teacher relationships were reported,
therefore enhancing teacher morale and the school environment and culture. Hornby

(2011) outlines how both home-based and school-based parental involvement in
facilitating academic achievement has been reported by numerous reviews and meta-

analyses of the literature (Fan and Chen 2001; Henderson and Mapp 2002; Jeynes

2005, 2007; Pomerantz, Moorman, and Litwack 2007).

From the literature it is evident that parental involvement in their child’s education
plays a significant part in their academic and social development. I now want to

examine how this general parental involvement could be successfully transferred to a

more specific area of learning such as reading development. In the next section I will
examine the literature to acquire a better understanding of the parent’s role in their

child’s reading development and the most effective strategies they can incorporate to
help enhance the child’s reading skills.

2.3 Parental Involvement in a Child’s Reading Development

There are six recognised strands of literacy – Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening,

Representing and Viewing. For this research, I chose to focus on reading, and
although reading is only one strand of literacy, it is still a very complex practice that

involves the combination of knowledge, strategies and understandings (Clay, 2001).
Children begin their adventure into the world of reading before they commence

primary education. Anglin (1993) notes that young children retain vocabulary at an

remarkable rate during the pre-primary school years. The time from birth to eight
years is the most significant period for literacy development (Bredekamp, 2000). It is

generally recommended that the parents begin reading with their child using picture
books, engaging illustrations often accompanied by short written text. The child will

start the cognitive process of understanding that pictures symbolise real-life objects,

an understanding that is uniquely human (Barton & Brophy-Herb, 2006). A study
tracked the eye movements of four year old children during adult-to-child picture

book reading, and the results showed that children rarely attended to the printed text
but had spent approximately 95% of the time looking at the illustrations in the book

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