Reading with children is an incredibly powerful tool for developing listening comprehension. When done properly, it can serve as an avenue for instruction across all component skills of listening comprehension. Although books are considered written text, when they are read to, rather than by, students, they are transformed into oral text.
Books are a unique source of oral text, as books typically contain more complex vocabulary, syntax, and grammatical structures than is used in conversational language1. Exposure to complex language helps students learn and comprehend it. Additionally, books contain information capable of engaging and expanding students’ knowledge. Books also serve as a catalyst for rich-dialogue, an avenue for language development.
Shared reading is a type of book reading during which an adult uses one or more instructional strategies to engage the student(s) in a fiction or nonfiction text to strengthen students’ language and literacy skills2.
Despite the strength of this practice, the quality of the texts and questions asked can affect the efficacy of it. Choosing high-quality texts is essential, as the words and content within the text are what guide the vocabulary and knowledge development students’ are able to experience. Teaching similar words and content through the use of curated text sets help students make connections among words and related knowledge3. The use of Content-Rich ELA instruction, which fuses literacy practices such as shared book reading and social studies/science content, can also support knowledge, comprehension, and vocabulary development4.
A key aspect of shared reading is dialogue, or multi-turn conversations facilitated by the practitioner. The text-centered dialogue can be leveraged by the practitioner to provide students with an avenue to hear and produce sophisticated language, receive scaffolding and feedback as they use language to employ higher-level language skills such as inference, and perspective taking, and provide students with the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of skills and content through others’ participation..
Other similar strategies, such as Dialogic Reading, Interactive Read-Alouds and Active Reading have the same instructional potential in that they are text-focused and can be used by practitioners to instruct across all listening comprehension component skills.
1 Kim, Y.-S. G., Boyle, H. N., Zuilkowski, S. S., & Nakamura, P. (2016). Landscape Report on Early Grade Literacy. Washington, D.C.: USAID.
2 Shared book reading early childhood education. WWC | Shared Book Reading. (n.d.). https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/EvidenceSnapshot/458
3 Cabell, S. Q., Neuman, S. B., Terry, N. P., Dickinson, D. K., Pollard-Durodola, S. D., & Gonzalez, J. E. (2023). Content Literacy: Integrating Social Studies and Language. In Handbook on the science of early literacy (pp. 155–156). essay, The Guilford Press.
4 Cabell, S. Q., Neuman, S. B., Terry, N. P., Dickinson, D. K., Cabell, S. Q., & Hwang, H. (2023). Leveraging Content-Rich English Language Arts Instruction in the Early Grades to Improve Children’s Language Comprehension. In Handbook on the science of early literacy (p. 178). essay, The Guilford Press.
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