Towards a better understanding of the role of parents’ literacy practices on children’s reading achievement

The IEA Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) was implemented in 2011 in large set of countries. This study provides information on pupils’ achievement in 4th grade and about numerous contextual variables, in particular, children’s attitudes and home support regarding literacy.

According to literature, home is the place where literacy practices are firstly built: “children socialized in reading retain or even increase their advantage in language performance compared to their classmates” (Kloostermann, Notten, Tolsma & Kraaykamp, 2011). A second factor that greatly impacts on reading achievement at elementary school is obviously the engagement of the child (Petscher, 2010). In PIRLS 2011, the construct of engagement has been captured by variables that measure how well pupils like reading.

We hypothesize that both factors are connected and that each factor cannot act alone. We will to investigate how and to what extent pupils’ engagement modulates the effect of the reading practices of the parents on the child’s reading achievement. We plan to apply path analyses (MPlus) on data from some countries which got contrasted results in Pirls 2011, such as USA, Ireland, France, Germany, Norway and Belgium.

Preliminary analyses performed on Belgian data show that the effect of parents’ literacy practices on reading achievement is split into a direct effect and an indirect one. Indeed this effect seems to be partially due to the child’s pleasure in reading which therefore could be seen as a mediator of student engagement.