Read alouds are one of those things almost every family does beautifully for a few years and then quietly stops. Your child learns to read a little. You get busy. Bedtime gets later. The ritual stops. This post shares why stopping was a mistake, along with the benefits to your child at any age.
Children build their vocabulary primarily through their ears, not their eyes, and that stays true far longer than you’d think.
Your two-year-old didn’t learn the word spatula from a book. They heard you say it while you were flipping pancakes. Your seven-year-old didn’t learn disappointed from a worksheet. They discovered the word when they felt it.
Words come in first through the ears. Then, later, when a child sees that word in print, their brain says, “Oh, I know that one,” and matches the sound to the word.
Researcher Thomas Sticht studied the relationship between what children can understand when they listen, versus what they can understand when they read. What he found, (and what made him famous in The Read-Aloud Handbook), is that a child’s listening comprehension runs ahead of their reading comprehension until around age thirteen or fourteen. Roughly eighth grade. Some newer studies put that convergence earlier, and researchers are still arguing about the exact age but suffice to say it’s well beyond age 8.
So, before middle school your child acquires more vocabulary by listening to the world around them. That means that your child can understand a book that’s read to them, far above the level they can read on their own. A fourth grader who’s decoding at a second-grade level? That same child can absorb a fifth or sixth grade book if you’re the one doing the reading.
Their reading brain and their listening brain are two different paths. The listening brain is essential to building vocabulary so that once their decoding catches up, they recognize the word. I saw this with my own daughter. We read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe out loud in the living room. Her decoding was in second grade. Her thinking was not. That’s the trap, and read alouds are the way out.
Now you might be thinking that you talk constantly to your child so doesn’t that count?
Yes, it counts for a lot but it isn’t enough.
Back in 1988, researchers Donald Hayes and Margaret Ahrens did a study where they counted how often rare words show up in spoken language. Rare words are those outside of the most common words we use every day. An everyday conversation between two college-educated adults? About seventeen rare words per thousand.
Prime-time television? About twenty-three. (Slightly better than talking, so there may be some benefits to watching tv!)
Now let’s compare that to written text. Children’s books? About thirty rare words per thousand.
Newspapers? Around sixty-eight.
So a children’s picture book contains nearly twice the amount of unusual vocabulary as a conversation between two adults.
That is because writing is different from speaking. When we speak, we use the fastest word available. When we write, we choose the most precise word.
There’s a more recent study by Montag, Jones and Smith that found the same thing from a different angle. They compared picture books to child-directed speech, and the books contained substantially more unique word types. Books simply carry more vocabulary per minute than we do.
And it isn’t only words. It’s the sentences.
Let me give an example. I may say to my daughter: “Grab your shoes. No, the other ones. We’re late.”
Now listen to how a book communicates: “Although he had promised his mother he would come straight home, Peter, who had never been able to resist an open gate, found himself standing in the garden before he knew how he’d gotten there.”
That sentence has a subordinate clause, an embedded clause, and a pronoun your child has to track across thirty words. Your child will never hear that structure as you’re running out the door to soccer practice. They’ll only experience it through books.
If your child is a struggling reader or dyslexic, they’ve been locked out of the words. Not because they aren’t smart enough but because the reading code hasn’t been handed to them…yet.
While their classmates spent multiple grades reading chapter books and absorbing thousands of new words almost by accident, your child spent those years on the mechanics. Working twice as hard for half the results.
Researcher Keith Stanovich called this the Matthew effect. It’s basically kids who read well, read more so they then learn more words, and so on…and so on. Kids who read poorly read less and are exposed to fewer words. The gap between strong readers and struggling readers widens over time.
But oral vocabulary isn’t a nice cherry on top of decoding. Think of it as the safety net underneath. When your child sounds out a word, their attempt is often close but not quite right. They might read machine as “match-ine.” But then they start playing with the sounds…and machine pops into their brain. But if they’ve never heard the word, there’s nothing to jump to. The attempt just sits there as nonsense.
So, basically, every word you put in your child’s ear is a word their decoding brain can retrieve later when needed.
Is there a right way to do read alouds? If there is, no one shared that with me when my children were younger. Reading out loud is good, but it’s only part of the equation. You need to explain unfamiliar words since that is part of the magic. Isabel Beck and Margaret McKeown built an approach called Text Talk about interactive read alouds. While their research focused on young children the procedure works for any age. Let’s call it: Stop, Swap, and Go.
Pick two or three words per session. If you stop eleven times, you’ve destroyed the story, and the story is what carries the words into memory.
Choose words your child will actually use again. Reluctant, ancient, furious, enormous. Use the word again later that day. You might casually say: “You seem reluctant to eat this broccoli.” Kids need to meet a word several times before it sticks.
Some parents worry that they’re not great readers. But here’s what’s important. Your child does not need a performance. They need your voice, at whatever speed it goes. Stumble over a word, laugh, back up, keep going. That is a better literacy lesson than a flawless reading. You child just watched you get stuck and not quit.
If read alouds really aren’t an option, pick an audio book for the car and do the same techniques: explain meaning, ask questions and have fun. Nonfiction counts and biographies are fabulous for read alouds. Perhaps pick a biography about a person your child is interested in.
What about books with complex sentences? When you hit one of those winding, thirty-word sentences with clauses stacked inside clauses there are some things that you can do for read alouds.
Then, reread the original sentence. This is the part most people skip but by doing this, your child hears the complicated version with the meaning already loaded in so their has an easier time processesing a complicated sentence structure. We call that syntax but there won’t be a quiz. You can read more about syntax at 3 Tips To Improve Reading Comprehension.
If you're exhausted from trying to be both mom and reading teacher after a long day at work, let me help. Book a free virtual consultation to see if our 1:1 tutoring is the right fit to bring some peace back to your evenings.
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