The Benefits of Reading and Storytelling For Young Learners

It is impossible for anyone to deny that a child’s reading skills are important to their success in school, work, and life in general. The majority of the world's most successful educators and business leaders have all read enormous amounts of books in their lives. In addition, when evaluating the most successful education systems in the world, you will find that they are all heavily based upon the use of books, (Electronic or physical), and reading. A child who grows up with a love of reading, a love that they nurture and expand upon throughout their lives undoubtedly, in the majority of cases, experiences greater success in life. 

Reading allows us to be transported from our own world to another. Between the pages of a book, we can become immersed in the lives of fictional characters and learn about a culture entirely different from our own. We can also learn new words and phrases, experience a range of emotions, and acquire skills and knowledge.

Because of the learning potential, the effects of reading on child development are vast and multiple studies have highlighted its benefits. As such, teachers and parents are in a great position to ensure reading is a key part of children’s daily routine. We’ll give you some more information as to why this is so important and provide some tips that you can use both in and out of the classroom.

Steps For Achieving Comprehension In Reading For Young Learners

Step 1: Teach the sounds of individual letters:

Students need to be taught the individual sounds in words and that words are made up of small parts of sound and phonemes. Recognizing individual sounds and understanding the relationship between letters and spoken sounds (phonics) create phonemic awareness.

Be sure to emphasize ending sounds as well as the more obvious beginning sounds. Listening for ending sounds is sometimes overlooked, yet it is very important.

Step 2: Teach sound blends:

Sound blends such as st, fl, dr, sh, etc should be emphasized on as well as digraphs such as ch, ck, ph. These letters together form distinct sounds or phonemes.

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Step 3: Teach whole words:

Whole-word recognition or word identification is made up of being able to use sound-symbol relationships. This is an important skill that is worth the time spent to master. Word families- bat, cat, pat, sat, etc. are important in this stage. Vowels should require special attention in this stage, especially when distancing between short /i/ and short /e/ (As in /pit/ and /pet/) throughout the whole-word reading process.

We learn some sight words incidentally or in the course of everyday life. Certain words are just recognized by their appearance and EFL students can recognize and appear to “read” signs and advertisements, such as Brand Names such as NIKE, Pepsi, etc.

Here are some materials you can use to promote the developing EFL students’ identification of sight words:

• Word games such as matching and word search games.
• Flashcards or reader books with plenty of sight words.
• Picture dictionaries.
• Rhymes and entertaining poetry.

Step 4: Present meanings:

Be sure that students know the meaning of each word they read. You can use a lot of techniques to present meanings such as drawings, pictures, miming, etc. Don’t forget to check the understanding of the meanings frequently. Be sure that students can discriminate the variations in meaning as well as go over words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings.

Step 5: Teach word parts:

It is important to teach word parts: prefixes, root words, suffixes, and derivations of words. When students know these parts, they will be able to understand more words. For example, when an elementary school student knows the meaning of “bed” and the meaning of “room”, they will understand easily the meaning of “bedroom”.

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Step 6: Put words in contexts:

Encouraging students to put each word in context is a powerful strategy. The student who can use words in sentences can demonstrate a mastery of reading and language usage as well.

Step 7: Teach reading comprehension:

Teaching reading comprehension is essential to achieve the enjoyment of reading or reading for pleasure and for understanding the informational text. Several important techniques to check reading comprehension can be used. You can ask students to:

• retell, summarize, or paraphrase what is read.
• make inferences or draw conclusions.
• sequence events.
• compare and contrast, etc.

Finally, the more that a child is read to, and the more that they read themselves, the better they will become at it. Practice really does make perfect and, the more a child reads, the better their overall academic achievement and social skills, like empathy, will be.

I hope that you enjoyed this article and found it helpful.

Good luck and good teaching.