Literature Review: Repeated Reading

     But how do children become good enough at retelling to warrant its use as an assessment tool?  Is it fair to use it if students have had little or no practice?  In order to read, children need to develop an awareness of the sound structure of spoken language. This begins in infancy as children become increasingly sensitive to the sounds of speech around them. Story repetition is a productive strategy to support language and literacy development.  Repeated readings also assist children in understanding and using language surrounding the actions, events and concepts of stories.  They notice sound patterns in the language and begin to pick up sound-symbol relationships (Bellon, & Ogletree, 2000 & Neuman, Copple, & Bredekamp, 2001).  

     Stories are an essential link to literacy and for young children, the world of stories can be as important to them as anything else in their lives. (Neuman & Roskos 1993).  Given a choice, young children prefer to hear favorite stories than a new book each day. Young children enjoy hearing the same stories again and again and try to stretch out what is enjoyable. This arises naturally from repeated exposure to books. By knowing what comes next in a story, children feel competent. Research has shown that children develop a better sense of story schema, plot structure, anticipation of events, memory of the story, and story language through repeated readings of the same story as compared to the same number of different stories. (King-DeBaun, 1999 &  Machado 1999).

     Numerous studies have been conducted to support the use of repeated readings in an early childhood literacy program.  Dennis and Walter (1995) hypothesized that first grade subjects, after listening to the same story over a four-week period, would significantly increase their story comprehension as measured by oral retellings. They concluded that comprehension improved as a result of the repeated readings and practice with retelling. The researchers state that some educational implications can be made because this study supports the findings of previous research: First grade students regardless of their academic ability can benefit from repeated read-alouds and educators can use story retellings with repeated read-alouds to assess the listening comprehension of students. 

     DeTemple and Tabers (1996) explored the relationship between early language experiences and later literacy and school achievement. They investigated the relationship between early repeated book reading experiences and later narrative skills and whether these narrative skills were related to school measures of literacy and language. Results indicated that repeated book reading experiences at home beginning at age 3 ½ were positively related to a child's story retelling ability at age 5 ½. They concluded that repeated storybook reading and retelling were positively associated with first grade reading and language achievement.