Reading Aloud Better Prepares Kids for School
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By SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 6/30/2008 2:00:00 PM
There’s more evidence that reading aloud to young children—especially in an engaging manner—promotes emergent literacy and language development and better prepares them for school.
“Reading aloud to children: the evidence” says the practice promotes a love of reading, which is even more important than improving specific literacy skills.
“When parents hold positive attitudes towards reading, they are more likely to create opportunities for their children that promote positive attitudes towards literacy, and they can help children develop solid language and literacy skills,” says the report by the authors, Elisabeth Duursma and Barry Zuckerman of the nonprofit literacy organization Reach Out and Read in Boston, MA, and Marilyn Augustun, MD, of the Department of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine. When parents share books with their kids, the authors say, they also promote in them an understanding of the world, their social skills, and their ability to learn coping strategies.
In fact, this may be more apparent among high-risk children from low-income families who have parents with little education, belong to a minority group, and do not speak English. The reason is because they’re less likely to be exposed to frequent and interactive shared reading.
Reading aloud to young children clearly prepares them for school. Phonological awareness—the ability to manipulate the sounds of spoken language—is an important prerequisite for learning to read, and reading aloud promotes preschoolers’ sensitivity to alliteration and rhyme. Exposing this to kids ages four and five, for example, contributed to their progress in reading and spelling at ages six and seven, the report says. And children’s knowledge of nursery rhymes at ages three and four is related to detecting alliteration and rhyme at ages four through seven.
“When children do well at detecting and manipulating syllables, rhymes and phonemes, they tend to learn more quickly to read,” says the report, which goes on to say that children’s oral language skills can be stimulated by parent–child literacy activities such as shared book reading.
“Children learn the meaning of new words during book-reading interactions with their parents [because] reading aloud familiarizes children with the language found in books and stimulates vocabulary growth,” the report says.
