Effects+of+Reading+Storybooks+Aloud+to+Children

Meyer, L. A., Wardrop, J. L., Stahl, S. A., & Linn, R. L. (1994). Effects of reading storybooks aloud to children. //The Journal of Educational Research, 88//(2), 69-85. Retrieved July 17, 2009, from Wilson Web.


 * Quotes || Reaction ||
 * 1. "Our goal in this study was to begin to unravel the mystique of lore and research from studies of adults' reading to children. Our first goals was to present a review of research about reading to children of various ages in several different contexts...Our second goal was to investigate specifically the relationships we found between teachers' reading to students in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms in the course of a longitudinal study of reading comprehension and science knowledge development in Grades K-6." (p. 70)

2. "Research conducted with preschool children generally supports this practice, although when one looks closely at these studies, one finds that parents were probably doing a variety of things, or one finds that the reports focused solely upon a 'reading to children' treatment and therefore did not explore other things parent might have been doing with their children." (p. 70)

3. "In summary, it appears that reading to children is certainly a highly promoted activity among professionals in the field of reading and among well-meaning lay persons alike. The positive effects on children's reading achievement from parents' reading to them seem to have taken place before children begin school, however. Furthermore, once children are in school, it is their participation in reading that appears to be positively related to their reading achievement." (p. 71)

4. "First, the naturalistic studies (Meyer et al., 1993); Stallings & Kaskoqitz, 1974) were conducted in similar ways. Researchers went into entirely English-speaking elementary school classrooms and observed teachers by keeping track of time spent in all activities during a school day. They then correlated time spent in each activity to student performance in reading. Without exception, they found activities directly related to the reading process, such as letter-sound practice and word reading, to be positively correlated with students achievement in reading. The amount of time teachers spent reading to students, however, correlated negatively with student achievement in reading. It appears that the farther one moves away from activities directly related to the reading process, the lower the correlation between that activity and reading achievement. Teachers' reading to students is an example of this phenomenon." (p. 71)

5. "From 1983 through the end of the 1990-91 school year, we studied two cohorts of pupils in three school districts. One of these district had primarily whole-class instruction. Cohort 1 consisted of pupils who entered kindergarten in 1983 and completed sixth grade in 1990. Cohort 2 students entered kindergarten in 1984 and completed sixth grade in 1991. There were approximately 325 pupils in each cohort." (p. 74)

6. "The data we have of this negative relationship between the amount of time adults spend reading to children in kindergarten and their reading achievement and the lack of a relationship in first grade are puzzling. The data also contradict the experimental evidence from studies that were well done and that we expected to be confirmed in the observational data." (p. 80)

7. "Possible explanations of the negative correlation are that teachers who spend a lot of time reading also engage in other activities that are relatively ineffective, or that time spent reading to children displaced other instructional activities that are more effective." (p. 80) 

8. "During examination of individual correlations, we did find that the correlations between adult story reading and achievement were more strictly negative on the two most decoding-oriented tests - the Chicago and the WRAT - and somewhat less so on the CAT and the Stanford. The correlations between adult story reading time and the listening measure of the CIRCUS, on the other hand, were positive and moderate in strength." (p. 80)

9. "Unlike what we found in the school data, the relationships between parents' reading and children's performance were positive, but they were weak and not statistically significant. The relationships between the children's participation in reading and achievement were much stronger, however, and statistically reliable. By putting these two sets of analyses together, we can make a case, not an ironclad one, but a case nonetheless, that merely reading aloud to a child will not really help him or her to become a better reader. Instead, the child has to participate actively in reading text. In other words, 'just reading' is not magic, but having the child actively participate with the print may be the essential ingredient. This appears to be true, at least in kindergarten." (p. 82)

10. "That is, it is possible that as adult story reading goes from none to some amount, the relationship is strong and positive, but above that point the relationship is negative. That is, up to x number of minutes, it is good for teaching to read to children, but above that point, because they may pay less attention to stories, or because adult story reading displaces some other activities, and so forth, it is not useful to read to children." (p. 82) 

11. "We ran a scattergram examining the relationship between adult story reading and a composite variable representing all of the reading achievement variables, and there seemed to be a break at about 10 min. However, the test for this was not statistically significant." (p. 82)

12. "We are not suggesting that parents and kindergarten and first-grade teachers stop reading to children. We believe that there may be numerous positive effects for adults and children alike from these times together. We want to emphasize, however, that reading to children is not magic. Whether examined as an isolated variable or in the context of other behaviors, it has not been found to be positively related to children's reading achievement in the grades where it was studies as a natural occurance. Reading storybooks to children is not a reading program. Is it part of a reading program. The direct benefits from exposure to storybooks can come only if children develop print-related skills, such as phoneme awareness and some word recognition." (p. 83) || 3. Some recent studies do show a positive relationship between reading aloud to children and reading achievement. The teachers in these studies use read-alouds to teach reading skills and strategies.

6. This study does not determine whether reading aloud has a positive effect on students' motivation to read. In addition, no mention is given to types of books read. I wonder if these finding would hold true if more nonfiction was read aloud.

6. The authors do not state how the read-alouds were conducted. I wonder if teachers used read-alouds to teach reading strategies.

7. It makes sense that to become a reader, children must read. Simply reading to them is not enough.

10. Ten minutes seems like a reasonable length for most activities in kindergarten and first grade given the attention spans of these children. ||  Tags: read-aloud, elementary school, research, reading aloud effectively , read-aloud cons