Conference Program

Caregiver-child shared book-reading interventions are considered an evidence-based approach for improving children's language and literacy skills. However, impacts on child outcomes are conditioned on caregiver implementation of the intervention. Caregivers implementing shared-reading interventions have the responsibility of maintaining regular shared-reading sessions and incorporating specific behaviors to enhance the activity. Many barriers can impede caregiver implementation, such as (1) time pressures, (2) lack of knowledge of benefits, and/or (3) discomfort with shared-reading activities. These barriers can impede caregiver implementation of shared-reading interventions, and studies find generally high levels of attrition from such interventions. Consequently, shared-reading interventions do not reach all caregivers and children and can increase inequities between implementers and non-implementers.

An implementation-science framework can be used to identify barriers of caregiver implementation of shared book-reading interventions, and introduce enablers to increase implementation. Enables comprise behavior-change strategies that can overcome barriers and increase implementation and, as a result, child outcomes from interventions.

In this paper, I present evidence identifying common barriers to caregiver implementation of shared book-reading interventions, as well as behavior-change strategies designed to overcome these barriers. For instance, a common barrier is time pressures, and a behavior-change strategy that overcomes time pressure is financial incentives. I then present findings from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) designed to test four specific behavior-change strategies and their effects on caregiver implementation of a shared book-reading intervention. The RCT involved caregivers and their 4-year-old children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Study findings showed that two behavior-change strategies - financial incentives and encouraging texts - increased caregivers' implementation and mediated intervention effects on children's literacy skills. Finally, I share initial results from a larger-scale RCT testing long-run impacts of behavior-change strategies on literacy growth of children with DLD as a function of caregiver behavior-change strategies.

The overall premise of this paper is that evidence-based caregiver-focused book-reading interventions can increase inequities between caregivers who can and caregivers who cannot sustain the intervention. Researchers must attend to barriers that inhibit "uptake" of such interventions and test strategies that enhance caregivers' capabilities in maintaining interventions. An implementation-science framework is imperative to conducting research addressing barriers and enhablers of caregivers' engagement in shared-reading interventions.

This study explores how Shared and Dialogic Reading Aloud (SAL) fosters equity by reshaping representations of anger among children and adolescents aged 5–18 in Italian schools—from binary, polarized models to layered, intercultural ones—aligning with reading as a promoter of democracy and equality (Batini, 2022).
The research adopts an integrated approach that combining structured interviews (administered to a sample of 500 participants aged 5 to 18) and semi-structured interviews aimed to explore deep-seated experiences and personal narratives regarding anger. This phenomenological phase is accompanied by a critical analysis of a corpus of 50 Western-produced picturebooks and young adult novels, tracing dominant narrative models. The final experimental phase involved the implementation of the SAL practice through the dialogic mediation of the book Kakèra. Histoire d’un petit morceau by Katsumi Komagata, used as an exemplary device embodying aa Japanese-rooted vision of anger.
Results reveal a close alignment: over 90% of youth responses mirrored the texts' narrative hegemony, portraying anger predominantly as a wild, binary force (repression vs. outburst) lacking generative or transformative functions. Introducing Komagata’s model via SAL dismantled this view, providing symbolic tools for reflective reworking of the emotion as "ethical intelligence" and a form of knowledge (Nussbaum, 2004).
In conclusion, the study demonstrates how dialogic reading’s equitable benefits expand emotional repertoires and deliver "narrative justice" (Tierney & Kan, 2021). SAL goes beyond emotion regulation, enhancing youth agency and transforming anger from isolation into a driver of conscious, democratic participation—offering a model for "democracy for learning.

Within the dialogical-transformative paradigm of shared reading aloud, this paper offers a theoretical and methodological reflection on a workshop device designed for lower and upper secondary school students, developed as part of the project “Leggere Forte 4.0: Immersive Experience, the Ability to Recognise One’s Own Desire, and the Development of an Ironic Mindset through Reading”, carried out by the University of Siena within the Tuscan regional policy Leggere: Forte! Ad alta voce fa crescere l'intelligenza. The reflection rests on the assumption that reading aloud, when guided by specific pedagogical categories and extended into autobiographical writing and dialogue, can function not merely as a means of strengthening linguistic competences but as a transformative experience capable of reshaping the subject’s relationship with the self, with others, and with one’s horizon of possibility.

The two pedagogical categories adopted as both interpretive lenses and criteria for text selection are irony and desire. Irony, understood not as a simple rhetorical figure, but as a cognitive device – a mindset and a form of intelligence – enables adolescents to step back from lived experience, to revisit situations in which they felt different, inadequate or exposed to others’ judgement, without being overwhelmed, thereby opening up spaces for reinterpretation and divergent thinking. Desire, conceived as an orientative and generative force, engages the dimension of the possible: the desire for recognition, belonging and future that runs through adolescence and that literary narrative makes it possible to recognise, name and share. The interplay between these two categories generates a particularly fertile pedagogical field: without irony, desire risks hardening into idealisation and producing frustration when it meets reality; at the same time, without desire, irony risks becoming detachment, self-protection, and fear of exposure. It is precisely their reciprocal tension that makes the device pedagogically significant.

The device, structured across four sessions, follows a recursive cycle: reading aloud from selected texts – including R.J. Palacio’s Wonder, Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and David Yoon’s Frankly in Love – followed by activating questions, autobiographical writing, and dialogic sharing. Reading aloud operates as an activator of emotional resonance: the literary text provides a narrative frame that legitimises the exploration of personal experience. Autobiographical writing becomes the device through which students reflectively rework their lived experience, giving linguistic form to what they have experienced and perceived. The subsequent dialogue transforms the individual act into a shared experience, fostering processes of mutual recognition.

The potential of the device lies in the very structure of the practice: reading aloud lowers barriers to literary engagement; autobiographical writing requires no prior competences yet gives each student a space for voice and self-narrative; the ironic climate, in turn, reduces the risk of emotional overexposure and encourages participation even among those who tend to withdraw. In this sense, the paper aims to show how the interweaving of irony, desire and self-writing, mediated by reading aloud, can constitute a transformative practice that democratises access to literature and opens young people to reflexivity and the desire for a future.

Shared Reading Aloud (SRA) has been extensively studied for its equitable effects on students (Batini, 2023; Batini & Corsini, 2025). However, less attention has been paid to how this practice impacts teachers’ professional vision regarding classroom participation dynamics and equity conditions. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing 720 logbooks produced by teachers involved in structured SRA programs. The objective is to examine how teachers narrate significant episodes from their practice and how these narratives reveal the roles they assume in equity-oriented participation and transformation processes. By interpreting teachers’ written accounts as material traces of their professional vision (Goodwin, 1994) and integrating the teacher noticing framework (van Es & Sherin, 2002; van Es, 2011) with structural semiotics (Greimas & Courtés, 1979), this study proposes a three-level analytical model.

The first level focuses on the focalization of the teacher’s gaze. Logbooks are analyzed to identify which dimensions of the educational event enter the “field of visibility”: classroom climate, student interventions, text content, dialogic dynamics, and ethical reflections, among others. The goal is to reconstruct the “field of the observable” constructed by the teacher, highlighting which phenomena are systematically recorded and which remain excluded from the scene.

The second level examines the actantial configuration (Greimas, 1966) of the reports. These episodes are analyzed as relational systems to highlight how teachers distribute agency within the narrated scene: identifying who or what acts as the subject (teacher, students, or the reading device itself), what constitutes the pursued “object of value” (comprehension, participation, ethical reflection), and which elements are implicitly configured as “helpers” or “opponents” to the process.

The third level introduces a diachronic analysis of the logbooks. As the same teachers record episodes week after week, the study tracks temporal changes in both focalization regimes and actantial configurations. The evolution of these logbooks is interpreted as the potential development of a semiotic competence within the teacher’s gaze—specifically, the progressive ability to recognize pedagogically relevant events and configure them narratively.

Through this tripartite perspective, the paper proposes a replicable model for analyzing educational documentation aimed at promoting equity. The implications address both the design of logbooks as reflective tools and teacher education, fostering a professional identity capable of recognizing and valuing the participation of at-risk students.

In recent years, research on reading and reading aloud has increasingly emphasized participatory approaches that actively involve learners in the construction of meaning. Within this perspective, the dialogical-transformative paradigm highlights the role of readers’ engagement and the potential of dialogic reading practices to foster equitable participation in the classroom (Murray et al., 2022). Research has shown that structured reading and shared read-aloud activities can support the development of linguistic and interpretative skills across different age groups (Batini, 2022; Giusti, 2025; Hoffmann, 2024). However, the organization of interaction during read-aloud sessions remains a central methodological question.

This paper presents an empirical classroom study that investigates the use of dialogic interruptions during the reading aloud of Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883/2014), carried out in the context of the bicentenary of the author’s birth. The study explores how strategically placed dialogic prompts may enhance students’ narrative comprehension, imaginative engagement, and participation during a teacher-led read-aloud session. The study is theoretically grounded in Spinner’s (2004) reflections on dialogic interruptions during reading aloud. According to Spinner, interruptions should be limited and placed at narratively significant moments in order to support students’ imaginative involvement without fragmenting the narrative flow. Rather than leading to a systematic analysis of the text, these prompts aim to stimulate anticipatory thinking, perspective-taking, and reflective engagement with literary characters and events.

To explore this approach, the study focuses on the episode in which Pinocchio enters the puppet theatre and encounters the puppeteer Mangiafoco. This narrative sequence is particularly suitable for dialogic interaction because it develops through a progressive build-up of tension: the curious entry of the protagonist into the theatre, the unexpected reaction of the puppets, the threatening appearance of Mangiafoco, and the uncertainty surrounding Pinocchio’s fate before the final resolution. Such moments of suspense correspond to the structurally significant points in the narrative that Spinner identifies as particularly appropriate for dialogic interruptions. During the read-aloud sessions, the researcher, acting as the reader, introduces a small number of open prompts at carefully selected points in the narrative. These interruptions are designed to fulfil different dialogic functions described by Spinner, such as encouraging anticipation about forthcoming events, inviting students to adopt the perspective of characters, and stimulating reflection on the behaviour and motivations of the protagonists. Particular attention is given to maintaining the balance between narrative immersion and dialogic reflection.

The research adopts a qualitative empirical design conducted in a classroom context. Data collection includes classroom observation, audio recordings of the read-aloud sessions and subsequent discussions. In addition to analysing classroom interaction, the study aims to produce a practical outcome: a structured description of the specific moments in the narrative where dialogic interruptions may be introduced. By identifying these moments, the study not only implements Spinner’s dialogically structured read-aloud approach but also provides a structured set of dialogic questions and example responses based on the Mangiafoco episode, designed as a model for a read-aloud classroom session that teachers can reuse or adapt.

Training parents of young children in the use of dialogic book-sharing (DBS) has been shown to be an effective, well-accepted, and cost-effective method to support improvements in child development, related to numerous key outcomes, such as language, attention, mental health, and socio-emotional understanding and functioning (Dowdall et al., 2019; Adrian, Clemente, & Villanueva, 2007).
DBS parent training has been shown to be particularly effective in contexts of socio-economic disadvantage, with notable benefits evidenced in trials conducted in Low-Middle Income Countries (LMICs) (Cooper et al., 2014). Given that these countries are where the majority of the world’s millions of children at cognitive and socio-emotional developmental risk reside (Grantham-McGregor et al., 2007; McCoy et al., 2016), the effectiveness of DBS in disadvantaged contexts highlights its potential in contrasting the cycle of deprivation, through the early uplifting of key developmental trajectories.
Beyond contextual factors, an open question remains regarding individual influences: how does a child's developmental status interact with DBS training? The effectiveness of DBS training may for example be proportional to initial developmental conditions (i.e., children who are more advanced at baseline remain comparably more advanced post-training); alternatively, the training may magnify developmental potential, and thus developmental trajectory inequalities (i.e., children who are more advanced at baseline get even further ahead post-training); more desirably, DBS training may promote more equitable outcomes by being especially beneficial for children whose developmental is least evident (i.e., children who are less advanced at baseline close the gap post-training).
The present study addressed this question by leveraging data from two randomised controlled trials conducted in South Africa: one on 14-16 month olds (Vally et al., 2015; N DBS: 49; N Control: 42), the other on 21-28 month olds (Dowdall et al., 2021; N DBS: 70; N Control: 70). In both studies, parents received an 8-week-long DBS training, and children were assessed, before and after the training, on receptive and expressive language, and attention.
Results showed that in both trials, the children who most benefited from the DBS parent training were those with the lowest language and attention scores at baseline. Children who performed poorly at baseline were found to close or reduce the post-training gap from other children, in all the outcomes examined. This pattern of findings was found to be especially pronounced in the younger aged cohort.
The findings from the present study strengthen the case for dialogic book-sharing: beyond being effective, well-received by parents and children, and efficient from an economic perspective, DBS actively promotes developmental equity by exerting a compensatory effect for those most at risk across key developmental areas. Crucially, this seems to be especially true the younger the child is, perfectly aligning with the WHO, UNICEF, and World Bank’s Nurturing Care Framework directive to intervene early to transform developmental trajectories and maximize human potential.

The border region of South Tyrol in northern Italy has three official languages and three separate education systems (Glück et al., 2019). While the German and the Italian systems are monolingual, with the respective other language offered only as a second language, the Ladin education system is trilingual from kindergarten to secondary school. Subjects are taught equally in German and Italian, and Ladin is added for communication purposes and taught as a subject. The significance of multilingual picturebooks in educational contexts in this lived multilingualism is examined using the example of the joint reception of a bilingual German-Italian picturebook based on the question of what scope for imagination, participation and mutual understanding it creates.

A second-grade class at a Ladin primary school is getting to know the additive bilingual picturebook ‘Die Heule Eule – La civetta Disperetta’ by Paul Friester and Philippe Goossens (2018) in a shared and dialogic reading aloud. The book is characterised by its experientiality (Fludernik, 1996) and uses a series of basic literary motifs such as loneliness and community, sadness and despair, comfort and hope, belonging and security. The audio and video recorded and conversationally transcribed conversations and multimodal interactions (Selting et al., 2010) are interpreted using key incident analysis (Kroon & Sturm, 2007). Against the backdrop of resonance theory (Rosa, 2019) and empirical research on literacy and literature education (Batini, 2023; Daly, 2021; Giusti, 2025; Hoffmann, 2025; Murrey et al., 2022; Naujok, 2023; Wieler, 2024), the analyses explore the opportunities for participation and spaces for resonance opened up by multilingual shared reading aloud discussions, with the aim of reconstructing linguistic, literary and aesthetic learning processes. The data is part of the empirical-qualitative project ‘IMAGO. Picturebooks – multilingual, rhyming and wordless – in kindergartens and primary schools in South Tyrol’ (Hoffmann, 2023) and provides ethnographic insight into everyday teaching and literature educational practices.

The paper starts with giving an insight into the theoretical background of resonance theory and providing an overview of findings of the empirical research on reading engagement and classroom interaction with picturebooks, before introducing the complex multilingual situation in South Tyrol and the research design of the IMAGO study. The focus is on the analysis of selected key incidents from the shared reading aloud discussions, from which the multi-layered learning processes of children growing up multilingually are reconstructed. In particular, the common multilingual practices and orientation on mutual understanding become visible. An outlook on literary multilingualism in educational contexts concludes the contribution.