Mother-child interactions during book reading and maternal beliefs about book reading

Reading books with young children is considered to improve their reading and literacy development and later school success. However, members of different cultures may have different perspectives and practices related to reading. In this thesis I investigated middle-class Japanese mothers' reading beliefs and home practices by conducting three studies.;First, I systematically analyzed differences in beliefs and goals between American and Japanese mothers, and found major significant differences in three areas of their home book-reading practices. Japanese mothers reported starting reading books with children about nine months later than American mothers. They also reported reading more folklore while American mothers reported reading more ABC and counting books. Far fewer Japanese mothers reported believing that children can develop language and literacy skills from book-reading. This questionnaire study of beliefs about book reading revealed large differences between Japanese and American mothers. Those differences are corroborated by the anthropological literature suggesting the ways Japanese and American mothers might differ in childrearing emphases.;Based on these findings, in the second study I examined whether Japanese and American mothers differ in their book-reading behaviors. My findings suggest that both Japanese and American mothers read to their children in culturally appropriate ways. Japanese mothers used fewer verbal interactions and a less confrontational reading approach, more often treating their children as their dependents. In contrast, American dyads had more verbal interactions and mothers showed their children how they could be independent readers by breaking up the text with many questions.;The third study examined how Japanese mothers read different types of books with children of different ages. They are aware that children of different ages need different kinds of support and that children need different supports when reading different types of book. The wordless book, Good Dog Carl, highlighted the characteristics of Japanese mothers since it forced them to produce more utterances. Japanese mothers did not use challenging talk such as why questions and vocabulary, perhaps because they do not believe in the connection between book-reading and reading development, as I found in my questionnaire study.