title: Effects of coaching on educators' vocabulary-teaching strategies during shared reading.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The purpose of this study was to investigate whether an emergent literacy professional development program enhanced educators' use of vocabulary-teaching strategies during shared reading with small groups of pre-schoolers.
  
  
  METHODS
  Thirty-two pre-school educators and small groups of pre-schoolers from their classrooms were randomly assigned to experimental or comparison groups. The 15 educators in the experimental group received four in-service workshops as well as five individualized classroom coaching sessions. The comparison group received only the workshops. Each educator was video-recorded reading a storybook to a small group of pre-schoolers at pre-test and post-test. The videos were transcribed and coded to yield measures of the vocabulary-teaching strategies and children's vocabulary-related talk.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The findings revealed that the children in the experimental group engaged in significantly more vocabulary-related talk relative to the comparison group. A non-significant trend in the data indicated that educators in the experimental group used more vocabulary-teaching strategies at post-test. The educators' familiarity with children's authors and book titles at pre-test was a significant predictor of their outcomes.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These findings suggest that an emergent literacy professional development program that includes coaching can enhance children's participation in vocabulary-related conversations with their educators.
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech-Language Pathology, University of Toronto , Toronto, Ontario , Canada.
authors.forename: Ashwini M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Namasivayam
authors.forename: Kathy
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hipfner-Boucher
authors.forename: Trelani
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Milburn
authors.forename: Elaine
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Weitzman
authors.forename: Janice
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Greenberg
authors.forename: Janette
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pelletier
authors.forename: Luigi
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Girolametto
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004493:Education / Q000379:methods*; D004496:Education, Continuing / Q000379:methods*; D005178:Faculty; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011932:Reading; D013663:Teaching / Q000379:methods*; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Vocabulary; pre-school; reading