Review of Literature

Background

Reading aloud is often identified as an enjoyable experience between adult and child and has been promoted as an important aspect of reading acquisition.

The author and parent, Jim Trelease, asserts that reading is a pleasure to be shared and one that has been identified as the single most important activity in school. He states that reading conditions the child's brain to associate reading with pleasure, creates background knowledge, builds vocabulary and through adult reading children are provided a reading role model (Trelease, 2001).

Developmentally, young children between the ages of 2 and 5 are experiencing an explosion of skills. Recent brain studies point to large amounts of brain and neuron growth during these first years of life. A child is learning approximately 5-10 new words a day and will have the use of over 1500 – 3,000 by the time he enters kindergarten, building his understanding of those words through concrete and abstract encounters with its meaning. During the preschool years, children are refining their ability to visually and auditorilly discriminate between words, letters, sounds and numbers. During this time, a preschooler begins to show his awareness of similarities and differences in words both orally and in print and begins to understand the fun of rhyming, semantics and word play (Adams, 2000, Neuman, & Roskos, 1998). In addition, young children are able to attend to a story for 5-10 minutes, sitting quietly and/or may engaging in discussions based upon the reading approach of the teacher. (Dickinson & Keebler, 1994, Martinez & Teale, 1993, Sipe, 2002 ). In school and at home, the average middle class child might be read to for 15 minutes per day and enter kindergarten with between 500-1,000 or more hours of reading encounters. Conversely, some parents of low-middle to low income homes reported reading to their children once or less per month (Morrow, 1998).

Theoretically, recent perspectives look at the importance of language interaction and adult modeling as well as adult availability to interact with children as key to language acquisition. Children participate in their own language development by continually making and testing hypothesis in order to arrive at meaning. Through a social process, or by interacting with others, children learn and use literate behavior before formal schooling and build upon this literate behavior throughout formalized instruction. (Braunger & Lewis, 1998, Ruddell & Ruddell, 1994).

This theoretical and developmental background framed the range and scope of the search for studies and publications that would lend empirical support to this practice of reading aloud to young children and provide some thoughts on the specific aspects of the event that are the most beneficial. .

Since the 1970's, the focus on early reading shifted from the idea that children needed to be ready to read before they would benefit from specific reading instruction, to the idea of emergent literacy, or the perception that children begin their experiences with written language with their first encounter with a book (Wan, 1998). It is these encounters with books, the frequency of encounters, reading style of the adult and explicit strategies used that will be addressed in this body of research.

In regards to answering the question of whether reading aloud provides children with a strong literacy foundation, this research did provide correlational, although not causal, evidence supporting reading aloud as a variable yet influential practice on vocabulary and language development, print awareness and potential reading achievement. The term variable is used to describe the variety of findings in regards to frequency, age, grade level parental practices and values as well as children's motivation. To provide an example of the continued confusion in this field of research, one meta-analysis found that shared reading experiences did not clearly indicate a significant impact on later literacy development (Scarborough & Dobrich, 1994). Another study found a negative correlation between the frequency of teacher read alouds in kindergarten and outcomes on literacy measurement tools (Meyer, Wardop, Stahl, & Linn, 1994). Yet, another meta-analysis (Bus et al, 1995) stated that the frequency of book reading was as good a predictor as phonemic awareness skills. Interestingly, the two meta-analysis' used almost identical studies and data, yet yielded different interpretations.

This research uncovered two categories of adult reading in this field. Intergenerational literacy studies or those involving parental shared reading and school or teacher based studies where the focus was on the effect of teacher shared reading. These two categories often overlapped as researchers sought both parent and teacher approaches and practices.

Regarding the area of parent-child read-alouds, reading frequency and/ or the age at which parents began reading to their child, has been shown to impact children's vocabulary and in some studies later reading achievement. (Allison & Watson, 1994, Scarborough , Dobrich & Hagar,1991, Bus et al. 1995) Children's vocabulary increased as a result of parent read alouds ( Dickinson &Smith 1994, Dickinson & Keebler, 1989, Wasik & Bond, 2001, Whitehurst et al, 1988, Senechal et al, 1996, Scarborough, Dobrich & Hagar, 1991, Bus, van Ijzend & Pelligrini, 1995)

In studies targeting low-income children, income was not the significant factor on literacy outcome measures. (Dickinson & Smith, 1994, Scarborough & Dobrich 1991, Smith & Dixon, 1995) Findings from these studies indicate that the exposure to print, storybooks or story vocabulary was a stronger factor than income. The studies that focused upon the impact of reading aloud to low-income or at-risk children. (Justice & Ezell, 2002, Dickinson & Smith, 1994, Scarborough, Dobrich & Hagar, 1991), found that many children came to school with little exposure to books, literate language or understanding of print and fell behind their peers on vocabulary and language measures. Smith & Dixon (1995), found that there are varying ideas, values and expectations of literacy by parents and it may be these factors that impact the degree of meaningful experiences children have with books. One longitudinal study found through parent reports, comments and later reading achievement scores that children seem to demonstrate motivation and interest in reading at an early age and this lack of motivation or interest has been linked to future reading difficulty. (Scarborough, Dobrich & Hagar, 1991). Thus, the implication is that children who are interested in reading and have books available to them will read and request to be read to more often. Children who do not attempt to amuse themselves with books have fewer experiences with books. Senechal, Lafevre, Hudson, & Lawson (1996) found that the amount of books in the home, impacted the interest of the child in being read to and the more he was read to the higher score he might attain on vocabulary measures. Several researchers have sought to train parents specifically in explicit approaches to reading aloud to increase vocabulary or print awareness skills. In one parentalintervention study, preschoolers whose parents received training in modifying their reading style scored 8.5 months ahead of children in a control group on measures targeting vocabulary knowledge. (Whitehurst et al, 1988) These gains remained six months after the intervention was completed. Another study trained parents on print awareness concepts such as letter and sound name with favorable results ( McKnight, Lee, Schowengerdt, 2001). This suggests that parent training and/or changing parent reading behavior is possible and has positive effects.

Regarding story structure, one study identified story language and the knowledge of story structure increased as a result of engagement with print, particularly before a child enters school. ( Meyer, Wardop, Stahl & Linn, 1994, Senechal, LaFevre, Hudson, Lawson, 1996). Based upon these findings, simply reading stories to children helps them become familiar with story language, construction and sequence. The study conducted by Meyer et al, however found a negative relationship between children's scores on reading achievement tests and the amount of time kindergarten teachers spent on reading aloud. The authors suspected that in this situation, teachers spent more time reading aloud and little time engaged in meaningful reading related activities.

As reading is often a daily practice in preschools, kindergartens, and daycare centers, several studies sought to investigate the differences in teacher reading styles and their effect on student learning. These studies have identified several different adult/teacher reading styles that were found to be used consistently among individual teachers. (Martinez & Teale, 1993, Dickinson & Keebler, 1989, Allison & Watson, 1994). Such differences in reading styles suggest that children's experiences with storybooks may differ from one teacher to another. One study found that teachers alter their reading style when engaged with children of different abilities. Kindergarten teachers used more cognitively challenging questions with children with low emergent literacy levels and less cognitively challenging interactions with children with higher emergent levels (Allison & Watson, 1994). Taken together, These studies raise the question of whether the teacher's style models and teaches a particular approach to comprehending certain aspects of the story such as theme, character, sequence, or vocabulary and in turn influence the student's approach to literature. Of between the 3 to 6 identified teacher reading styles, performance oriented teachers, or those whose style does not promote discussion or interruptions during their reading, had students who scored better on vocabulary and comprehension measures (Dickinson & Keebler, 1989, Dickinson & Smith, 1994). These teachers promoted discussions before and after the reading but did not pause during the actual reading. Suprisingly, children whose teacher's did pause for comments, vocabulary reinforcement or to highlight a story event did not do as well as students with performance-oriented teachers. These findings contrast with other intervention studies that suggest engagement during reading aloud has positive effects on print awareness, vocabulary and comprehension.(Justice & Ezrell, 2002, , McKnight, Lee & Schowengerdt, 2001, Wasik & Bond, 2001,Whitehurst et al. 1988). Explicit instruction focusing on picture, phonemic awareness, vocabulary or print aspects of the story while engaging children in the reading event was found to have beneficial, although short term effects on outcome measures of print concepts, phonemic awareness and vocabulary knowledge. ( Bradshaw, Hoffman, Norris, 1998, Justice & Ezell, 2002, McKnight, Lee & Schowengerdt 2001, Wasik & Bond, 2001). Meyer, Wardop, Stahl & Linn (1994) found that the less time a teacher spent reading aloud to children and the more time she spent in print related activities had an effect on increasing child's scores on reading achievement measures. Children who were engaged with discussions or comments about letters and their sounds increased their scores on print awareness measures (McKnight, Lee, Schowengerdt, 2001, Justice & Ezell, 2002). Guided discussions or explicit engagement activities before, during and after read-alouds and beginning at an early age, promote vocabulary and story comprehension, story concepts and language ( Bradshaw, Hoffman & Norris, 1998, Beck & McKeown, 2001, Justice & Ezrell, 2002,). Recent literature has been published promoting the positive effects of a teacher's interactive styles of reading (Barrentine, 1996, Gambrel & Almasi, 1996, Gunn, Simmons, Kameenui, 2000, Sipe, 2002). Research based recommendations from this body of literature highlight repeated opportunities to practice interacting during read-alouds and teacher modeling and expanding on the comments and questions of the students. This concept of guided discussions may help to change the seemingly current practice of less reading aloud, less child discussion and more adult -directed talk in general, in all classrooms. Unfortunately evidence suggests that these distinctions increase as a child's grade level increases (Morrow, Rand & Smith 1995).

As alluded to previously, the practice of repeated readings has been found to have some benefit. ( Bradshaw & Hoffman, 1998, Bellon & Ogletree, 2000, Morrow, 1988, Wood & Salvetti, 2001, ) It appears that repeated readings or reading the same book several times, allow children to practice their emerging understanding of story concepts, vocabulary, discussion and interacting. In addition, this repetition gives the teacher multiple opportunities to model interactive reading approaches and expand upon children's knowledge base.

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