Sharing Personalised Books: A Practical Solution to the Challenges Posed by Home Book Reading Interventions

Abstract

The propsed project addresses the recently introduced claim that the socio-cultural relevance of parent-child engagement in home book reading needs to be at the heart of new interventions in this area. The rationale for this project was to offer a practical solution to concerns about the challenges posed by traditional shared book reading interventions and about the need to take account of multiple, rapidly changing home learning environments. The proposed project brings together this broad range of issues by evaluating the benefits and effectiveness of an intervention which uses self-made personalised books, in various formats, languages and forms. As such, the project acknowledges the socio-cultural variety of home learning environments and taps into the motivational issues for parents' (non)participation in traditional early book intervention programmes. In this paper, we identify the project's core principles, concentrating on two major tenets of the study. Firstly, the importance of story book sharing being personally meaningful to both parents and children, and secondly, the socio-cultural and temporal relevance of a home book reading intervention.