Contributions of Understanding and Evaluation Prompts to the Development of Children’s Language Skills and Related Emotions During Shared Book Reading

Shared book reading (SBR) is considered an appropriate approach to enhance children’s language development. Meanwhile, Bloom’s Taxonomy serves as an evaluative tool for assessing cognitive competencies and a scaffold for designing educational activities considered intellectually rigorous. However, the contributions of SBR prompts to children’s language abilities and related emotions remain unclear, particularly the impacts of understanding prompts (UPs) and evaluating prompts (EPs) on the development of their language abilities and related emotions. To address this gap, the current study recruited 96 ADHD children and 113 typically developing (TD) children. After 12 weeks of SBR intervention, the results showed that embedding prompts into SBR significantly enhanced children’s language development. In particular, amongst the TD children, the UP group performed better than the EP group in terms of reading interest. However, the EP group performed better than the UP group in terms of expressive vocabulary and syntax. Moreover, amongst the ADHD children, the UP group had higher scores in syntax and reading interest than the EP group. This study sheds lights on parental prompt selection to help enhance children’s language development during book reading activities.