Parent Book Talk to Accelerate Spanish Content Vocabulary Knowledge

This article bridges research to practice by summarizing an interactive contentenriched shared book reading approach that Spanishspeaking parents of preschoolage children can easily use in the home to accelerate content vocabulary knowledge in Spanish. The approach was implemented in preschool classrooms using a transitional bilingual education model in Central Texas and in a Saturday Spanish heritage language school in the Midwestern United States. Spanishspeaking emergent bilingual children from both lower and higher socioeconomic status backgrounds learned contentrelated vocabulary via parent-child discussions of Spanish storybooks and informational texts organized by compelling science and social studies themes and topics. The authors provide recommendations for how teachers can support Spanishspeaking parents' ability to develop informal knowledgebuilding experiences through homebased interactive book discussions in Spanish.