June 19, 2008
Childrens, Why reading?
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Reading to children is an important tool for language development. Intuitively, we know it has some effect on their future interest in reading and books. Books are useful in themselves, but the interaction between the child and adult reading together is vital.
Psychologists at York University recently studied interactions between parents and children while reading. It was found that all parents, despite gender or marital situation, added value to reading by what they said to the child. Children who had good language scores had parents who tied the story back to the child’s own experiences. Imitation and questions about the text were also related to language development in the older age studied (three year olds).
It is an interesting study and made me think more about how I interact with my children when studying. A summary of the article is reproduced here:
Book reading styles in dual-parent and single-moth…[Br J Educ Psychol. 2006] - PubMed Result
May 27, 2008
Childrens, Why reading?
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By reading a variety of books, magazines, and newspapers, students gain exposure to complex vocabulary, and reading becomes a prime opportunity for learning new words. … Given the importance of reading to lexical development in school-age children and adolescents, reading should be promoted as a leisure activity during these years. Lang Speech Hear Serv Sch. 2005]
Literacy is vital to language development. It seems pretty obvious, but it is something we may sometimes forget. Parents of kids who don’t like reading are passionate about getting them to read “good books.” A group of researchers at the University of Oregon recently investigated what older children and young adolescents actually like reading, and what else they like doing.
The results were not particularly surprising. Music and TV, sports and video games were the most popular pastimes, while reading feel somewhere in the middle. Magazines were preferred to novels, and comics were also popular. Most importantly, reading time dropped as children got older. This has vast implications for language development in teenagers. Sure, you can probably “talk real good” by age fifteen, but at that age, english writing tasks are becoming increasingly complex, job interviews are beginning and comprehension is becoming much more technically demanding as students are asked to assimilate technical science and maths data from multiple sources.
In the opinions of the authors, speech pathologists should use students preferences to enable them to continue leisure reading, in whatever form. Why is it that I have multiple magazine subscriptions as an adult, but I had to go out and buy my favourite comics at the newsagent as a kid? I hope I can keep all this in mind when my kids slow their reading habit.
“Literacy as a leisure activity: free-time preferences of older children and young adolescents.” - Nippold MA, Duthie JK, Larsen J.
May 13, 2008
Childrens, What to Read
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I was driving home from visiting my dear sister this afternoon, and was lucky enough to hear a radio interview with John Hamblin. John was a presenter on ABC TV’s Playschool for a long time, and is now publicising a biography, “Open Wide, Come Inside” (by Peter Richman). I don’t read many biographies at the moment. I went on a jag of political biographies and I got over self-serving rewriting of history. But this title really tickles my fancy. I would love to reminisce by seeing the “other side” of the show I loved as a child.
So, maybe you’ve turned off biographies recently. Are you interested in a trip back in time? Here are some other biographies of children’s personalities:
