Teachers and parents could help boost preschoolers’ reading skills later on just by changing how they read books aloud to the children, a new study suggests.
Simple things like pointing out words and letters and noting that text is read from left to right led to more advanced reading skills as much as two years later in preschoolers who took part in the study by Ohio State University researchers.
Published in the April issue of the journal Child Development, the study involved more than 300 low-income children with below-average reading skills who participated in a 30-week shared reading program. The children were separated into three groups and read the same books by teachers. In some groups, teachers were trained to make print references; others read as they normally would.
