Prevention of reading difficulties: Effects of a parent-child program designed to promote early literacy skills

In Germany, the use of familial resources in the prevention of reading difficulties has hardly been addressed although the importance of the home literacy environment for reading acquisition is well known. The parental training program "Let's read!" combines joint reading with the promotion of phonological awareness, as well as the ability to detect phonemes and larger verbal units and to manipulate them. To investigate the effects of the program on verbal abilities, we compared the progress of children who participated in the program over 16 weeks with the progress of an untreated waiting group. Children participating in "Let's read!" improved significantly in terms of phonological awareness measures and a trend for improvement was observed for story comprehension. No significant effects were found for letter knowledge and vocabulary. This study highlights how a structured parent-child training program enables parents to promote their children's phonological awareness and to contribute to the prevention of reading difficulties.