The Importance of Reading Aloud
By Nita Luthria
Librarians of India
What are your earliest memories of being read to? A parent reading you a bedtime story, perhaps, or a grandparent reading aloud from a religious text, or a teacher reciting a poem in class. Or, like many children in our country, perhaps you never had the chance to be read to by a caring adult who made a book come alive with voice and expression.
Too many adults stop reading to children the moment the child learns to read independently, worried that it will make the child lazy or unmotivated to read on their own. They could not be more wrong. Reading aloud to children is one of the best ways to get them to fall in love with books — and it creates a special bond between reader and child, because the two travel into a story together and experience its marvels in unison. As Rebecca Bellingham, author of The Artful Read-Aloud, puts it, reading aloud “is one of the most important things any teacher, parent, or grown-up can do to help children become better readers, thinkers, and frankly, better human beings.”
A read-aloud is, simply put, a practice where the reader reads a text aloud to children, using pitch, tone, pace, pauses, eye contact and expression to bring it to life. It is far more than a classroom activity. India’s NIPUN Bharat Mission for Foundational Literacy and Numeracy lists the read-aloud among its key pedagogies, affirming that it “develops listening skills along with interest in understanding the story.” The National Curriculum Framework – Foundational Stage (2022) goes further, calling read-alouds an opportunity to introduce children to good literature and to familiarize them with vocabulary and language. And this magic isn’t reserved for the classroom, or even for childhood: every child, from infancy through adolescence, deserves to experience it, much as many adults today find joy in audiobooks — or as generations of Cuban cigar-factory workers have, with a reader reading aloud to them as they roll cigars.
The benefits run deep. Reading aloud builds vocabulary, since books hold far richer language than everyday speech. It develops phonemic and phonological awareness through rhyme and alliteration. It sharpens listening and communication skills, and — because children are freed from the work of decoding words — it lets them focus purely on meaning, building comprehension, imagination and thinking skills. As Mem Fox writes in Reading Magic, reading aloud “sharpens children’s brains and helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly.” Perhaps most important of all, it builds print motivation — a genuine love of books and reading that underlies every other literacy skill a child will ever develop.
All you need is a good book and your voice.
This piece draws on our manual, The Art & Magic of the Read-Aloud: Nurturing Young Minds Through Words, which you can download for free from Librarians of India.
