Research in the area of early literacy has documented the importance of storybook reading to developing early literacy skills. The research on scaffolding and the development of these early literacy skills has rarely looked at how preschool teachers read to young children or how they use techniques to informally assess and guide children's literacy development. This study was designed to find out how teachers interact with children during a storybook reading to give this guidance. It was of particular interest to examine how teachers may guide the development of young children's oral and written forms of literacy.

The participants were twelve teacher/child dyads from four preschools in the Southern California area. The children were all four years old. The teachers elicited a made-up story from the children, encouraged the children to attempt to read a book, and then read that book to the children, with each dyad reading session conducted in a one-on-one–setting. Teachers combined the techniques and the strategies to more effectively guide the children along the children's level of understanding by matching emergent literacy strategies and pairing them with scaffolding techniques to elicit similar strategies in the children.