image credit: Read OR Listen?, via flickr

A recent ACLU study on the effects of parent-child shared reading discovered that the way we read to small children is just as important as the act of reading itself. According to this study involving 275 families with children aged 0-4, “back-and-forth conversation was strongly associated with future improvements in the child’s language score. Conversely, adult monologuing, such as monologic reading, was more weakly associated with language development.”

It’s clear that while all sorts of shared parent-child reading is beneficial for children, interactive reading is the best way to use reading to help your child’s language development along. According to the authors of this study, “each day, children hear an average of some 13,000 words spoken to them by adults and participate in about 400 conversational turns with adults. More conversations mean more opportunities for mistakes and therefore more opportunities for valuable corrections. Furthermore, they also provide an opportunity for children to practice new vocabulary.” We all know that books are a wonderful tool for encouraging dialogue between parents and even the youngest of children. So what steps can we take to make sure that daily reading time with kids is a two-sided conversation rather than a parental monologue?

Best selling author of Raising Bookworms: Getting Kids Reading for Pleasure and Empowerment , Emma Walton Hamilton, recently shared some great tips for turning storytime into an interactive reading experience on Raisingyourkid.com. Here are a few highlights:

*Read with vocal “color.” This is probably the most important tip of all. Keeping the voice alive and interesting can make all the difference in terms of a child’s ability to listen and follow a story. Use emphasis here, enthusiasm there, tenderness another place. Find the cadences and rhythms of the author’s language, and try to convey the mood or the characters’ intentions. There’s no need to be a ham, or yuck it up so much that the listener pays more attention to the vocal acrobatics than the story itself, but it’s important to avoid monotonous reading. Keep it fresh!
*Stop from time to time to ask questions. Check in with young listeners about their thoughts and reactions to the story or pictures – “Why do you think he or she did that?” “What would you do in that situation?” “What do you think is going to happen?” “Do you see what I see?”
*Personalize the story. Look for ways to insert the child’s name into the text, especially if it’s a book that speaks directly to a child and only uses pronouns, or to substitute the name of a character or place with a familiar one. Draw parallels between the events and characters in the story and those of your child’s life.
*Role-play with dialogue. If a child is old enough to read, divide the character roles and alternate reading the dialogue together. This is a great way to draw a child into the story, and to help them learn to read aloud with animation.

Interactive reading is a topic you’ll be hearing a lot about on Bilingual Readers, as we’re always in search of new ideas for enhancing the parent-child shared reading experience. We’d love to hear about any ideas that have worked for your family, so please feel free to share!