Parents as Multidimensional Reading Partners for Young Children’s Reading Development: A Scoping Review

Abstract

This scoping review aims to identify the appropriate roles of parents that can help address problems related reading development amongst young learners. The topic of parents as reading partners needs to be explored given that having the involvement of parents would advantage language learners to minimize their reading problems from different aspects including interest, fluency and comprehension in reading. Parents’ role is in fact, an effective indicator of high language proficiency level. Numerous studies that explored reading development found that most young learners are still facing challenges in mastering different types of reading skills. This problem seems unending despite various approaches, methods and interventions are applied to tackle reading issues among young learners. Therefore, a more practical and reliable way of learning that can cater to students’ individual needs should be devised. A scoping review protocol was established for this study. A total of 42 articles from 2010 to 2020 were qualitatively synthesised. Out of 42 articles, twenty-six articles are on parents’ role in young learners’ reading problems and sixteen articles highlight reading problems aided by parents’ roles were isolated and analysed. The findings suggested that parents’ roles are effective as motivator, tutor and facilitator in aiding children’s reading problems from the aspects of their interest, fluency and comprehension. The involvement of parents in learners’ reading development is beneficial as it also offers reliable references for teachers to adopt in school programmes.