The Power of Shared Book Reading

As a child, I still remember reading books on the car ride, before bedtime, and throughout my school. My mom would point at the words as I read, explain to me with great excitement, that always makes me extra interested for no reason. Then as I grow up, I would do storytelling sessions as my parents hit the video camera on.

Reading with my parents has been a great part of my childhood and as Elliott-Templeton, Van Kleeck, Richardson, and Imholz (1992) discovered, the introduction to the world of reading starts as young as 6 months old.

What is Shared Book Reading?

As the word 'shared' suggests, it requires both parent and the child to engage in an activity at the same time of course, but most importantly, being interactive by posing questions, discussing the story, e.g 'What do you think will happen next?.

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And here are 5 reasons why you should read with your child:

Elicit speech production

Shared book reading creates a great natural opportunity to encourage communication (Paul, R., Norbury,C., Gosse, C., 2018): commenting on the story, reading out loud, or even just imitating what we say! Then upon each response, we could react accordingly to facilitate communication, e.g 'Yes you are right! The dog is happy', or just imitate their babbling would be a great response as well.

Build up their vocabulary bank

Shared book reading is a wonderful platform to learn new vocabulary for tiny tots. (Montag, Jones, & Smith, 2015) In the world of creative stories, children can discover new vocabularies, they allow them to build a creative story of their own. That being said, it is also great to search for books within their zone of development: neither too easy that they understand everything nor so difficult that they do not understand a thing.

Good language ability

It is shown for typical children, the younger the age when they are read to, the better they are with their language and literacy skills(Dunst, Simku, and Hamb, 2012). In fact, this amazing benefit is also grasped by children with disabilities (Towson and Gallagher, 2016).

According to Trivette, Dunst, and Gorman (2010) and Waski and Feldman (2013), reading to your child, enhances their ability to express and comprehend in both oral and written form.

Good literacy skills

Interactions during shared book reading are shown effective in facilitating literacy development ----the skill essential for both oral and written communication. (Chomsky, 1972; Dunst, Simku, & Hamby, 2012; Ezell & Justice, 2005; Whitehurst et al., 1988). Literacy skills include their awareness of different sounds, how books, stories work even vocabularies. If you are still confused, stay tuned for a coming post about Literacy skills!

Good social skills

This might not be obvious, but as Cole, Maddox, and Lim (2006) mentioned, shared book reading is effective in a way that it contains it provides parents a platform to ask questions, comment, and do turn-taking with their child. Even if the child does not do the same, the interaction between their parents introduces them to the specific social rules in conversations: talk after someone finishes a sentence, the importance of turn-taking in, how to comment appropriately.

As above, now you can see why 10 out of 10 preschools have daily story reading time, but, what is better than being read to by your parents?

Aside from these amazing speech and language benefits, shared book reading creates a stronger bond with your child as you will get to know each other more.

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Have a great day and don't forget to smile!