Why read aloud?

Mural located in Brown Academy, Chattanooga, TN

When parents read to their children regularly, they are building a love of language, books, and reading. Jim Trelease describes the obvious reasons we read aloud to children in his book, The Read Aloud Handbook. When we read to our children we are entertaining, bonding, informing or explaining, arousing curiosity or inspiring them with this simple act of sharing a story. Trelease explains further that when reading aloud to children, parents are also creating a pleasure association surrounding the reading experience, creating background knowledge, building vocabulary and providing a reading role model (30).

Reading to children from birth, as opposed to starting in the months leading up to school enrollment, builds a great amount of background knowledge. Trelease describes this in great detail in his book:

As you read to a child, you're pouring into the child's ears (and brain) all the sounds, syllables, ending, and blendings that will make up the words he or she will someday be asked to read and understand. And through stories you are filling in the background knowledge necessary to understand things that aren't in his neighborhood- like war or whales or locomotives (40).

Trelease explains that the most important skill children can have before entering kindergarten is a developed vocabulary (40). The first four years of elementary school instruction is primarily oral, therefore the students with the highest vocabulary will understand the most instruction, and those with the lowest vocabulary will understand the least (40). Many parents wait until kindergarten is near to begin teaching their children letters and reading books, but this sets the child up for a lifetime of struggling to catch up. Parents can begin setting their child up for success right from the start by reading to children daily, which will ultimately enhance the child's vocabulary and provide context for which words should be applied.

Mural from First-Centenary United Methodist Church

Families today are busier than ever. Parents work, children have school and extra-curricular activities, homework, and by the time dinner is over reading to your child can seem impossible to fit in the day. Like Trelease, Cynthia Dollins, author of the book The ABC's of Literacy, focuses on the pleasurable experience created when parents and children read together. Dollins suggests that families create a bedtime routine that includes cuddling up and reading a story together (9). By building story time into the nightly routine, families can use this time to unwind together. Of course this is not to say that bedtime is the only time to read with your child, every family should find a time that suites them. The emphasis should be reading together to create a pleasurable, bonding experience. Dollins states that reading a book with your child is one of the most special gifts that parents can give to their children (10).

Reading aloud to children from an early age is crucial in developing lifelong readers. Bill Thurman, founder of Read Aloud Chattanooga, states that the hardest part of the program's mission is discovering how to get the ideas in the homes of children. Though it may help, simply providing books to families does not solve the problem. Teaching the parent to engage in reading with the child is the goal. Educating parents about the importance of reading aloud to their children, and how to do so effectively, is the issue that needs to be addressed.

Literacy Concerns in America

Literacy is a concern that America has been battling for years. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) performed by the National Center for Education statistics, 14 percent of Americans have below basic literacy skills, while 29 percent of the population has just a basic literacy level. These two categories account for almost half of the U.S. population. The NAAL is sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics, and is an improvement upon the National Adult Literacy Survey given in 1992. From 1992 to 2003 there has been minimal change in literacy levels. Little change indicates that America has not found a way to significantly improve literacy levels. Remediation is needed for a large part of the adult population but early intervention could be a better answer. How do we as a nation improve literacy rates?

Research suggests that early intervention is key. In the report, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, a direct correlation between a child's vocabulary and the time adults spent talking to the child had staggering impact on verbal development. Hart and Risley's study found that children in the lowest economic families knew an average of 525 words; less than half of children in professional families who had a vocabulary of 1,116 words (Hart). The report states "...the subsequent rate of vocabulary growth is strongly influenced by how much parents talk to their children" (Hart). This study is a window into homes of different economic classes in the U.S. Lower income families are at a higher risk of low literacy levels based on their verbal interaction alone. What is the potential outcome if parents could be encouraged to not only talk to their children resulting in a higher vocabulary, but to also read to them?