Shared reading of picturebooks for supporting preschool children’s multilingual learning: a scoping review

The shared reading of picturebooks, a practice in which an adult reads and talks about a picturebook with one or more children, has been well-documented for its potential to promote children’s early language development. The past two decades have witnessed increased scholarly attention on shared reading with multilingual children, yet the potential of this practice to facilitate children’s multilingual learning, or their learning of two or more languages, remains under-investigated. This scoping review examined 19 empirical articles on the shared reading of picturebooks to support preschool-aged children’s multilingual learning. The review mapped the elements of the shared reading activities presented in these studies. Our thematic analysis of these studies identified three ways in which adults have been found to support children’s multilingual learning through shared reading: bilingual interactions; strategies for eliciting children’s talk about the picturebook; and adults’ linguistic choices. The review also revealed research gaps such as limited focus on multilingual children from diverse linguistic backgrounds outside the USA, scarce research on children speaking more than two languages in multilingual countries, few observational studies that focus on adults’ linguistic choices in shaping shared reading as a context for supporting multilingual children’s language learning, insufficient studies on the shaping influence of different types of picturebooks (e.g., wordless, multilingual and digital picturebooks) on adult-child interactions, and limited attention to how the design of picturebooks shapes the ways in which parents and children jointly read and interpret them. Implications for future research and early childhood practice are discussed.