Review of Literature

            Children are read stories at home and at school.  The purpose of these read-alouds plays a more important role in a child's literacy development than we realize.  These read-aloud experiences allow the children to construct meaning from the text.  Read-alouds can take place in a whole class, small group or in a one-to-one setting.  The conversations that surround the text before, during and after the reading play a vital role in the student's comprehension of the story.  Learning to read and reading to learn are important components of literacy development.  In order for students to learn to read they need to acquire the strategies needed to become independent readers and learners.  The strategies include being active participants, building schema, text interaction, and accessing prior knowledge and experiences to bring into the meaning making process.  The read-aloud experience helps the students to learn these strategies during their literacy development.  As in the Dennis and Walter article they quoted from Anderson et al. in Becoming a Nation of Readers that “the single most important activity for building knowledge required for eventual success is reading aloud to children.” (p.33)

            Learning to read requires the students to be active participants.  Interactive read-alouds opens the door for the student to respond freely and openly in a social context (Barrentine, 1996).  As students are actively questioning and commenting on the words of the texts and of their peers they are constructing meaning.  This meaningful dialogue that is transpiring allows deeper and more thoughtful meanings of the text to emerge.  As students begin to internalize the story and dive deeper into more critical thinking about the text they are moving closer to the ownership of the story.  The importance of story ownership follows “the belief of the power of literacy to change our lives and the lives of children” (Sipe, 2002, p.482).  Although not all students are active learners who question and take control of conversations, the passive learners still benefit from the read-aloud experience.  They listen to and think about what their peers have said and they begin processing the information to make meaning with the text.  In Morrow and Smith's study (1990) Morrow states that “reading stories to children aids in their literacy development because the children and adults appear to learn best through active generative learning” (Morrow & Smith, 1990, p.215).

            Learning to read should occur in a social context.  The social interaction between classmates and their teacher plays an important role in the comprehension of the text.  It is the talk that surrounds the reading that is crucial to literacy development.  “Literacy develops through social interactions between children and significant others in specific environments” (Morrow & Smith, 1990, p.215).  The child learns to negotiate text and build schema when they are engaged in dialogue about the story.  It is through the conversations with their peers that story meanings become clear and more structured for the students.  In a study conducted by Morrow and Smith (1990) they found out that small group read-alouds were more beneficial to story comprehension than the one-to-one and whole class settings.  The interactions among the small group members helped to improve comprehension because the students were better able to explain the material and they could clarify any misconceptions that other students might have had.  Interactive read aloud is a very social experience but a rewarding one.  It is both positive and rewarding because it gives many opportunities for all children to participate and benefit from the interactions and the dialogue with their peers. (Barrentine, 1996).

            An important part of learning to read is the comprehension aspect.  Learning to read is developmental and learning how to understand a story is developmental also.  It is important that emergent readers develop story schema, to assess prior knowledge and experience and to make meaning from the text.  Emergent readers learn these strategies through the modeling of them from their teachers and their peers.  The read-aloud experience invites these opportunities for modeling in a casual, relaxed and social ways.

There are many ways that teachers can model appropriate comprehension strategies with read-alouds.  One example of teaching the strategies is Text Talk.  Text Talk is an approach the students use to build meaning through open ended discussions and questions. (Beck & McKeown, 2001).  Text Talk is a strategy based on the work of Beck and McKeown called Questioning the Author.  “Questioning the Author focuses on text ideas and encourages students' participation in building meaning from those ideas as they read the text” (Beck & McKeown, 2001, p.15).  Through talking about what they have read they are building up comprehension and they are enhancing their language development.  As teachers it is important to keep the conversations focused, to build scaffolding where it is needed and to monitor the talk that is being done during the read aloud experience.

            Another example to help guide reading comprehension development during the read-alouds would be an approach called instructional conversations.  During these conversations the students are expected to actively build upon their own knowledge and understanding (Goldenberg, 1993).  The instructional conversations approach is divided into two groups of instruction, instructional and conversational. (Goldenberg, 1993).  In the instructional part teaching is organized around learning. The conversations that surround this talk are directed and scripted by the teacher.  In the conversational part, the learning revolves around the interactions and talk with peers and teachers.  It is free flowing and not directed by the teacher.  The talk begins to take on a life of its own.  These types of conversations are not like the structured teaching that many teachers are use to.  Instructional conversations help promote reading comprehension because it is through this type of talk that the meaning making process begins to develop and mature.  The teacher provides the theme or the focal point and the students jump into dialogue with each other.

            Another program that is beneficial to the early and emergent readers is the Directed Listening Activity (DLTA).  This framework provides the students with a strategy to organize and recall information from a storybook (Strickland & Morrow, 1989).  This is essential to early and emergent readers because they need guidelines to help them build story structure and later be able to demonstrate that knowledge through a retelling of a particular text.  “Through retelling, they demonstrate comprehension of story details and sequence, adding inferences and interpretations as well” (Strickland & Morrow, 1989, p.323). 

            Another strategy used to help promote reading comprehension is the Directed Reading Activity. (DRA).  The Directed Reading Activity is an organized framework that provides students with the scaffolding needed to understand an unfamiliar text. (Morrow, 1984)  The DRA consists of questions that the teacher would ask before and after the story was read.  Questions consisted of traditional comprehension questions, story structure questioning or a combination of both types of questions.  In a study conducted by Morrow (1984) she found out that children scored higher on a comprehension test when they were provided with the scaffolding they needed to understand a story.  When the DRA is modeled and practiced by the teacher the students can begin to internalize this framework and bring it with them when they read an unfamiliar text.  The DRA is another technique to help students understand a story.

            It is important that the students recognize what they bring forth to a conversation is an important piece to the comprehension puzzle.  The students must use their prior knowledge and experiences and begin to make connections with their own experiences to the story that is being read.  If teachers demonstrate the value of a student's personal experience and prior knowledge to a story character's experiences than the teacher will see that the student understands what is happening in the story.  The read-aloud experience is a perfect opportunity to teach reading comprehension strategies.  Through the teacher's modeling of thinking aloud and thinking while reading the students will begin to see that good readers think while they are reading (Taberski, 1998).  The thinking aloud process will help readers to understand the story better and make predictions about future events, all strategies needed to help promote reading comprehension.  Teaching strategies to students is a vital part of learning how to read.  The read-aloud experience allows the teacher to model, demonstrate, and to think aloud how to begin the process of making sense of an unknown story.

                Repeated readings of the same book play an integral role of a student's comprehension of that text.  There have been many studies done to show the positive effects of repeated readings.  Through repeated readings the students understand the text better because they are able to make more literal and inferential meanings about the story. (Martinez, 1983).  They know what comes next and begin to gain a sense of ownership of that story.  Comprehension takes time and repeated readings of the same storybook allow for the time the students need to make meaning (Yadan, 1988).  In Dennis and Walter's 1995 study on repeated read-alouds there was a significant increase in the scores of first graders on an oral retelling of a repeated story compared to their scores from a single read.  The differences they found in the retellings were centered on the fact that the children gave more details, more plot events and had a more complete story sequence when they were retelling the story from a repeated read aloud.  In this study they discovered that the repeated read aloud benefited all students regardless of their abilities.  The repeated read aloud is an important component of the comprehension process.  Reading a story over and over again helps the students to make connections with the text and to bring forth their own personal experiences.  It also helps students to listen differently because they know what to expect in the story.  Many times children pick up ideas and thoughts during the second and third reads that they did not see in the initial read.  In these types of read alouds the children take on a more active role by starting the conversations and sharing more comments about the story with the group (Martinez & Roser, 1985).  The students are able to gain more control over story structure and gain a sense of ownership of that story. The children's pleas to read it again should not be ignored because of the important role that repeated readings play in the comprehension process.

            When children enter a classroom they bring with them a diverse background of literacy experiences.  Some children enter the classroom with little or no previous exposure to read-alouds or with books.  At that moment they are already falling behind in their literacy development.  Teachers can help close the already widening gap with read-alouds in the classroom.  Klesius and Griffith (1996) tried to recreate the lap reading experience of home in a Kindergarten classroom.  They called on volunteers and aides to read with a small group of children every day during an independent reading block of time.  This newly created situation allowed the students to experience being active participants in the reading process, to gain knowledge about themselves and the world around them and most importantly to experience the pleasure of reading.  All of these are important parts of their literacy development that they were missing because of their experiences at home.  In a study conducted by Morrow, O'Connor and Smith (1990) the researchers investigated the effects of a story reading program on literacy development of at-risk Kindergarten students.  They found out that the storybook reading program developed the skills needed for early reading readiness.  It also helped to improve the students' comprehension and attempted readings.  Most importantly it encouraged more reading to be done at home, an essential part of getting at risk students on grade level.  Prior to the study many of the participants were never read to at home.  In another study using low income and at risk students, Brown, Cromer and Weinberg (1986) wanted to find out if the shared book experience was a successful model of literacy development especially for this particular population.  In their shared book experience, the teacher or the aide reads the story to the students four times, they listened to the story on tape and in a small group setting.  Activities of the day were related to the stories that were read.  The researchers analyzed the results of their study and noticed an increase in the number of low income children whose scores on a state mandated assessment test increased.  There were more students above the cut off mark which was designed to target which students would be labeled at risk.  The shared book experience made an impact on the readiness of these particular students and it also provided all the students with the necessary tools to help in their process of learning to read in first grade.  The teachers of this study noticed that the students were more aware of the concepts of prints and were actively involved in the literacy events that were unfolding in front of them.

The read-aloud experience is an important part of a child's literacy development but it is often ignored or rushed in today's pressure packed curriculum.  It is an easy part of the curriculum to implement because all that an adult really needs is quality books to read to a child and time.  The problem of time and trying to fit everything into the day was seen in a study done by Copenhaver (2001).  In her study she observed a master teacher who was torn between the read aloud experience that she believed in and the district's skills based reading program.  The teacher tried to fit in the read alouds when some free time opened up in her day.  Copenhaver observed that discussions around the text were based on straight forward comprehension questions and talk that needed to stay on topic.  Many of the teacher's comments were for behavior issues and there were some validated comments for the students and many invalidated responses.  When Copenhaver and the teacher changed the way she did the read-alouds, back to the way she did them before Copenhaver noticed changes in the students as well.  The behavior issues stopped and the conversations and interchange between the students and the teacher were rich and similar to the kinds of literature conversations that the teacher had before.  The time constraints that were put on the read alouds really affected the whole experience.  When the time constraints were removed the read-alouds were rich, and the students talked, debated and participated in the reading experience.  A rushed read aloud had an affect on all the children especially the borderline children who are at risk.  To make the read-alouds truly beneficial we need to give the time it deserves.  In another study that demonstrated the power of time in the read aloud experience was a study done by Feitelson, Kita & Goldstein (1986).  In their study they wanted to find out what the effects of reading aloud to first graders would be on their comprehension and use of language.  Their study took place in Israel and the teachers were asked to read 20 minutes a day with their class.  The first graders went to school for half day sessions six days a week.  The researchers found that the students that were in the experimental group, the group read to for 20 minutes a day, scored significantly higher on various decoding, comprehension and active use of language tests than the control group.  They also outperformed the control group in a running record of the student's oral reading of an unknown passage.  The researchers also discovered that the children were excited about reading and they were so motivated from this experience that the students encouraged their parents to buy this series story and to read it by themselves.  The researchers did note that one of the teachers was dropped from this study because she was not reading to her students for the assigned times.  She thought it was too difficult to find the time to read aloud to her students because there was too much to do in the first grade curriculum.  That is what is so striking in this study was that the teacher gave up an essential part of the student's literacy development to work on worksheets and drills.  If the teacher realized the benefits from reading aloud she probably would have made the time.  Reading aloud is not just reading words from a story to children to fill in some time. Reading aloud is an experience that children need to make meaning with the text, to interact with it and to talk about it. 

The read aloud experience is an essential part of a child's literacy development.  In learning to read the students need to be active participants, have social interactions and need to learn the strategies needed for comprehension and the read aloud experience guides in this process.  In the interactive read-alouds the children are active in the meaning making process, discussing, debating and thinking about the responses that they heard.  Learning to read is a very social process.  The read-alouds encourages talk through small group, large group and even one-to-one situations.  It is the talk that surrounds the text that helps students to understand the story.  During the read-alouds the teacher is able to model, scaffold, to think aloud and to make connections that will help the student to learn to comprehend unfamiliar texts independently.  Read-alouds and the shared book experiences give the tools necessary to help at risk students to be on target.  This type of learning benefits all types of diverse learners.  The read-aloud experience plays an important role in a child's literacy development and it should not be taken for granted the impact that it makes.  The difference of reading to a child 20 minutes a day can make will last a lifetime.  

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