Anglophone picturebook shared reading in Chinese families —A mixed method study exploring parents’ motivation and parent-child interaction patterns

This study aims to probe the motivations of Chinese parents who read Anglophone picturebooks to their children, and to explore parent-child interaction patterns during the shared reading event. This study is the first to probe this new educational phenomenon in the Chinese context and in parenting culture.
Data collection consisted of a questionnaire, with 565 parent respondents followed by qualitative research focusing on seven families, through ethnographic observation of the shared reading event and interviews with a parent from each family. This study applies a grounded theory approach in order to describe and analyse this new educational trend.
Results show that parents’ motivations for reading Anglophone picturebooks are driven by English picturebooks’ linguistic, literary and educational value rather than by aims such as nurturing book lovers or consolidating the parent-child bond. Parents and children tend to choose different English picturebooks and value different characteristics of English picturebooks. These tensions between parents’ and children’s choices and values of picturebooks are negotiated and resolved according to my data.
I developed a typology of foreign language parent-child shared reading with five foci to reveal the diverse parent-child interaction process:
1. Literal focus: parents and children are engaged in exact translation;
2. Literacy focus: parents and children are engaged in developing reading skills;
3. Literary focus: parents and children are engaged in the pleasure of reading;
4. Exploratory focus: parents and children are engaged in knowledge and discovery;
5. Digital focus: parents and children are engaged in interaction with technology.
Using these foci, I compared Chinese parents’ shared reading in English with their shared reading in Chinese and found that there are more similarities than differences when they read in a different language, which demonstrated that the most important factor that influences parents’ shared reading approach was their attitude and motivation towards shared reading.