Question
Why is it important to read aloud to infants and young children?
Answer
Reading aloud is an important critical listening task. If we can recommend only one thing to our families that really sticks, it is to read aloud to their babies, beginning in infancy. I recommend 10 to 20 baby books a day. I don't actually know if 10 is better than five or if 30 is much better than 20 - we just know that reading aloud as a part of a spoken interactive conversation with our babies is a critical component in those 20,000 hours of listening.
Why read aloud to babies and young children? It's important to read aloud because exposure to storybooks is actually the biggest factor in a preschooler's vocabulary. In fact, reading an actual physical book tends to evoke more conversation than an electronic book. It doesn't mean that electronic books are bad, but when you have an actual book, you have more conversations about it. With a concrete item like a book, there are fronts and backs to explore, pages to turn, textures to feel, and scents to smell. Having a physical book gives you more to say. More parent conversations occur during read-alouds than during any other activity. Children who receive read-alouds show gains of more than twice as many new words. Reading aloud to children before age six years of age affects language, literacy, and reading. Think about reading as a conversation - we're talking about the book and we're talking about what's happening. I encourage us not to look at reading as a task to be checked off, but as an enjoyable, playful conversation that grows a child's brain for learning. The goal is to be reading chapter books to a child by the time they're four years old. This goal applies to all children, even those who have a doorway problem or hearing loss, and use technology to breach the doorway to get information to the brain. By chapter books, I don't mean to read a 4-year-old War and Peace. I mean reading books that have continuity of chapters and fewer pictures. This will extend the child's auditory attention, auditory memory, auditory predictability, auditory sequential skills, memory for new words, and expansion of concepts. You can really never read to a child too much, as reading can be integrated into every activity.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from a course entitled, How to Grow a Young Child’s Reading Brain, by Carol Flexer, PhD, CCC-A, LSLS Cert. AVT.
