Dissertation: Home environment and teacher-led reading interventions support early reading skills in low-income contexts
What did you study?
Children acquire language and early literacy skills at home and in school. Both literacy environment at home and reading instruction in school foster early literacy and reading skills. However, the extent of their contribution varies across language and socio-economic contexts. Yet, evidence on the role of home literacy environment and effectiveness of reading interventions in classrooms is limited regarding children’s literacy acquisition in two distinct orthographies.
I investigated the mechanisms through which home literacy resources and practices in children’s first language (Hindi) and second language (English) contribute to their early literacy and reading skills in English. Also, through randomised control trials, I examined the effectiveness of teacher-led phonics instruction supplemented with an adaptive tool GraphoLearn-Rime for supporting early literacy and reading skills in Grades 1 and 2 in low-income contexts in India.
What were the results of your research or what is its main outcome?
Besides reading instruction and shared reading in English with parents, access to private tutoring emerged as a key lever for supporting the skills. Mothers’ education level and fathers’ literacy skills in English particularly played a significant role in children’s language and literacy acquisition. In school, phonics-based reading instruction from teachers, both with GraphoLearn-Rime and without, was more effective than business-as-usual instruction for the learners, including children below the 25th percentile. GraphoLearn-Rime benefited children with more skills at baseline, more in-game progress, and more attendance at teacher-led phonics instruction.
How can the results be applied?
The findings are relevant for multilingual and low-income contexts. The links of children’s skills with home literacy practices and parents’ education and literacy level indicate the potential of supporting home literacy environment through interventions, for example, strengthening parent-child interactions, especially around literary resources such as books. Context-relevant proximal factors such as access to private tutoring must be examined further. Importantly, phonics instruction is valuable in the context for supporting early literacy and reading skills in English, and computer-assisted reading interventions may add more value when aligned with the classroom instruction.
What new information did the study bring to the topic?
The dissertation provides new evidence on the mechanisms underlying acquisition of early literacy and reading skills among children in low-income and multilingual households. Importantly, the sub-studies contribute evidence on the learning mechanisms that support reading development through a positive learning cycle.
Dissertation event information
MA (Educ. & English literature) Deepti Bora defends her doctoral dissertation in teacher education "Supporting foundational literacy development: Examining home learning environments and classroom-based reading interventions in multilingual India" in 22 August 2026.
Opponent is Professor Victoria Murphy (University of Oxford) and custos is Professor Minna Torppa (University of Jyväskylä).
The language of the dissertation is English. The event can be followed in Päärakennus C4 or online.
