Reading Aloud

by Amber Miller

January 18, 2025

Why read aloud? There are many good reasons: perhaps we want to build community in our classrooms by creating a shared book experience or demonstrating new vocabulary words in the context of a story. Read-alouds are an evidence-based, age-appropriate way to build listening comprehension and oral language skills (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008; Swanson et al., 2011). By reading a book aloud, we remove the burden of decoding the words, allowing more cognitive energy to be devoted to deriving meaning from the text. Through read-alouds, children can access novel vocabulary, complex stories and text structures, and other literary elements that may not exist in the types of books they can read independently.

• To learn about World Read Aloud Day, visit http://www.litworld.org/wrad/

• To learn about ways to celebrate the read-aloud via Skype and other technology, visit Andy Plemmons’ blog at http://barrowmediacenter.com/tag/read-aloud/.

• For ideas and lists of good read-alouds for different ages and stages, visit https://readaloudamerica.org/how-to-encourage-kids-to-read-resources/

• For ideas about using the read-aloud more effectively in the classroom or library, visit http://www2.scholastic.com/teachers/collection/reading-aloud-every-classroom.

Teaching Vocabulary and Comprehension through Interactive Read Alouds

One key thing to keep in mind when using a read aloud to teach new vocabulary or to teach a comprehension strategy is making your lesson interactive. You'll want to provide multiple opportunities for the students to practice using the new word or strategy. Another important aspect of comprehension and vocabulary instruction is being explicit. Start by modeling, then provide guided practice, then provide supported independent practice with scaffolding and feedback as needed. I do, we do, you do!

For example, if you are teaching the skill of direct recall to kindergarteners, you might start by explaining that readers learn things when they listen carefully to a story. They hear information right in the book. As you read, you would stop multiple times, thinking aloud to demonstrate what you learned from reading the book. In the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff, you might stop to model:

"I just learned why the mouse wants to look in the mirror. He wants to look in the mirror to make sure he doesn't have a milk mustache. I learned that by reading it in the book."

Scaffolding

What does scaffolding look like during a read-aloud? Again, suppose you are reading If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and have asked your students: "Why does the boy look so tired at the end of the story? Consider this sample language to scaffold students to arrive at the correct answer:

Teaching Vocabulary

A read-aloud is an excellent context for explicitly teaching new vocabulary to children. You'll want to choose high-utility vocabulary ahead of time and come up with a student-friendly definition of each word you teach. Make sure to draw attention to the words as they come up in the book and to give your students lots of opportunities to practice using the words.

Teaching Inference

Read-alouds can be used to teach many different comprehension strategies; we'll focus on teaching students to make inferences. Read this article, Interactive Read Aloud Instruction with Narratives (Kelly & Barber, 2021). As you read, consider the authors' suggestion to develop a paired set of questions to scaffold the skill of inferring: a question to activate prior knowledge paired with a question to integrate that knowledge with information from the text.

Dialogic Reading

Now, we'll turn our attention to a specific type of read aloud found to be especially effective for developing oral language in preschoolers: dialogic reading. Dialogic reading is an interactive shared picture book reading designed to enhance young children's language and literacy skills (American Institutes for Research, 2007). Effective read alouds are interactive; dialogic reading relies on an explicit and systematic set of strategies to encourage and support oral language and participation among students.

While reading, the teacher follows this procedure (represented by the acronym PEER):

Prompt the child to say something about the book Evaluate the child's response Expand on the child's response Repeat the prompt

Example: Teacher: What did the three bears make for their breakfast? Student: Cereal! Teacher (to herself): He has the right idea but doesn't know the specific vocabulary. Teacher: That's right, they made a kind of hot cereal called porridge. What did they make for breakfast? Student: Porridge!

The teacher uses the acronym CROWD to remember different types of prompts they might use:

• Completion prompts: repeat a statement and purposefully pause so the children can provide the missing word(s)

• Recall questions: encourage the children to recall details or sequential events

• Open-ended questions: designed to elicit multi-word responses and may have more than one correct answer

• Wh- questions: who, what, where, when, why

• Distancing questions: prompt the children to make connections with the book

To learn more about dialogic reading and watch a video example, check out this article from Reading Rockets: Dialogic Reading: An Effective Way to Read Aloud With Young Children