Talking With the Book, Not Just at Children: A Cluster-Randomized Trial of Dialogic Reading in Luganda Primary 1 Classrooms

Abstract Dialogic reading is an interactive technique where an adult and a child have a conversation about a book, rather than the adult simply reading the text to a passive listener. The fundamental shift is that the child becomes the storyteller, and the adult acts as an active listener and questioner who scaffolds the child's language development. This study examined whether dialogic reading, delivered through familiar Luganda Primary 1 materials used in Ugandan classrooms, could improve vocabulary and listening comprehension more than standard “chalk and talk” literacy teaching. The trial was designed as a cluster-randomized study because the intervention changed whole-class teacher practice rather than individual children’s tasks. Twenty Luganda-medium Primary 1 classrooms in central Uganda were randomly assigned to either a 10-week dialogic reading condition or a comparison condition that continued usual instruction. In the intervention arm, teachers used short, structured prompts embedded in the “I do, We do, You do” sequence drawn from the national teacher guide and adapted for shared reading, picture talk, oral literature, and brief retell routines. Outcomes were Luganda vocabulary and listening comprehension, with fidelity tracked through classroom observations. Results showed that children in the dialogic reading group outperformed peers in the comparison group on vocabulary with a moderate effect and on listening comprehension with a smaller but still meaningful effect. Findings suggested that the strongest classrooms were not the most scripted ones, but the ones where teachers genuinely extended children’s responses, invited peer talk, and used the book to connect language with lived experience. Framed by Social Constructivist Theory, the findings suggest that children learned more when the book became a shared conversational space rather than a text read at them. This article argues that, in low-resource settings, better talk around familiar-language materials can be a practical and scalable way to strengthen language for later reading.