Yoga for Emergent Literacy 131least ten seconds before modeling or prompting the answers is
suggested. Prompting can include pointing to a word or picture,
providing the first sound of the answer (e.g. Adult: “What sound
does a lion make? Rrrr...”), or giving semantic clues (e.g. Adult:
“What does a monkey eat? It’s yellow and long”). In addition to
answering questions posed by adults, it is important that children
be given the opportunity to ask questions. In this way, children
will have the opportunity to initiate language during shared book
reading rather than just respond. Children with autism spectrum
disorder (ASD) more frequently respond to language than initiate
language. Opportunities for them to initiate language during
literacy activities can be very beneficial.
Expansion and extension are two other language-facilitating
techniques that can be used during shared book reading.
Expansions are adult-contingent verbal responses that repeat a
child’s prior utterance while adding relevant grammatical details.
Expansion involves restating and completing the child’s immature
utterance. For example, when the child says, “Cow eat,” the adult
expands the child’s shorter, ungrammatical utterance to the
grammatically complete “The cow is eating.” Extensions, a related
language-facilitating strategy, are contingent verbal responses
that add semantic information to the child’s prior utterance. For
example, when the child says, “Cow eat,” in reference to a picture
in a book, the adult can add new content, such as the type of food
the cow is eating as is done in the response, “The cow is eating
grass.” This latter example includes both grammatical expansion
and semantic extension. In shared book reading contexts, adults
are likely to use both of these techniques together. The embedding
of expansions and extensions during shared book reading helps
build competence in all language domains, including word and
sentence structure, vocabulary, and pragmatics, especially back-
and-forth reciprocity and topic maintenance in conversation.
These language-facilitating techniques broaden the scope of