The Read-Aloud Handbook

by Jim Trelease
www.trelease-on-reading.com
(Compiled by Christina Bentheim)

This information is only a smidgen of what’s available in his book. READ IT!

“A school's objective should be to create lifetime readers—graduates who continue to read and
educate themselves throughout their adult lives. But the reality is we create schooltime
readers—graduates who know how to read well enough to graduate. And at that point the
majority take a silent vow: If I never read another book, it'll be too soon.”

(First-person pronouns refer to Jim Trelease.)

Why Read-Aloud

Every read-aloud is an advertisement for pleasure, every worksheet is an ad for pain.

In 1985, the US Department of Education’s Commission on Reading issued its report, “Becoming
a Nation of Readers”. It is, in my subjective opinion, the most important and "commonsense"
education document in 25 years. Among its primary findings, two simple declarations rang loud
and clear:

"The single most important activity for

building the knowledge required for eventual
success in reading is reading aloud to
children."
The Commission found conclusive evidence to
support its use not only in the home but also
in the classroom: "It is a practice that
should continue throughout the grades."

One can arguably state: Reading is the single most important social factor in American life
today. Here's a formula to support that. It sounds simplistic, but rest assured, all it's parts can
be documented, and while not a 100 percent universal, it holds true far more often than not:

1. The more you read, the more you know;

2. the more you know, the smarter your grow;
 3. the smarter you are, the longer you stay in school;
4. the longer your stay in school, the more diplomas you earn and the longer you are
employed—thus the more money you earn in a lifetime;
5. the more diplomas you earn, the higher your children's grades will be in school;
6. and the more diplomas you earn, the longer you live.

The opposite also would be true:

1. The less you read, the less you know;

2. the less you know, the sooner you drop out of school;
3. the sooner you drop out, the sooner and longer you are poor;
4. the sooner you drop out, the greater your chances of going to jail.

The basis for that formula is firmly established: Poverty and illiteracy are related—they are
the parents of desperation and imprisonment.

 82 percent of prison inmates are school dropouts.

 Inmates were twice as likely to be ranked in the bottom levels of literacy as is the
general population;
 60 percent of inmates are illiterate.
 63 percent of inmates are repeat offenders.

What can we tell parents in at-risk families?

Poverty parents love their children as much as affluent parents do. A telling difference lies in
what a parent knows or doesn't know about what's good for a child. For example, the poverty
parent may think if a child is happy and quiet in front of a television set, that's good. The
educated parent is more apt to know that too much TV is harmful and further knows that
children should be read to daily.

 Welfare children were less likely to have been read to by a parent each day.
 While poor families can afford fewer books, it should be noted that everyone is welcome
to help themselves to the public library's shelves.
 The poverty child's lack of book time was evidenced in the child's attention span in
kindergarten where teachers reported the higher the education level of the parent, the
longer the child's attention span.

In spite of the daunting statistics listed above, there are children who emerge from poverty
zones and rise to great heights. And they're doing it as early as kindergarten. The
aforementioned U.S. kindergarten study showed that among children coming from a single-
parent home in which the mother was a high school dropout, 52 percent achieved on the lowest
reading levels, but— six percent (two children in twenty) performed at the highest level.
Moreover, forty percent of college students from the wealthiest quartile graduate with a four-
year degree while only six percent of those in the lowest quartile graduate. 8 You can focus on
those who didn't make it or you can say, "Wait a minute! In a given year, six percent of the
most at-risk students graduate from college!"

Meaningful Differences

Researchers began by identifying 42 “normal” families; no drug, alcohol, or spouse abusers and
non-transient. Three socioeconomic groups were represented: welfare, working class, and
professional. Beginning when the children were seven months old, researchers visited the homes
for one hour a month, and continued their visits for two and one-half years.

During each visit, the researcher tape-recorded and transcribed by hand any conversations and
actions taking place in front of the child. Through 1,300 hours of visits, they accumulated 23
million bytes of information (the equivalent of 15 books) for the project database, categorizing
every word (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) said in front of the child.

The project held some surprises: Regardless of socioeconomic level, all 42 families said and did
the same things with their children. In other words, the basic instincts of good parenting are
there for most people, rich or poor.

And then the researchers received the data printout and saw the "meaningful differences"
among the 42 children.
TOTAL WORDS HEARD BY AGE 4

Professional 45 million words

Working class 26 million words

Poverty 13 million words

Source: Meaningful Differences, by Hart and Risley

When the daily number of words for each group of children was projected across four years,
the four-year-old child from the professional family will have heard 45 million words, the
working class child 26 million, and the welfare child only 13 million. All three children will show
up for kindergarten on the same day, but one will have heard 32 million fewer words—which is a
gigantic difference.

None of this has anything to do with how much a parent loves a child. They all love their children
and want the best for them, but some parents have a better idea of what needs to be said and
done to reach that best. They know the child needs to repeatedly hear words in meaningful
sentences and questions, and they know that plunking a two-year-old down in front of a
television set for three hours at a time is more harmful than meaningful. In a few short years,
when it is time to read, those numbers will play a big role, for the frequency with which a child
has met a word will affect how quickly he can decode it and understand it.

Let’s Just Talk Instead

Most conversation is plain and simple, whether it's between two adults or with children. It
consists of the 5,000 words we use all the time, called the Basic Lexicon. (Indeed, 83 percent
of the words in normal conversation with a child come from the most commonly used 1000 words
and it doesn't change much as the child ages. Then there are another 5,000 words we use in
conversation less often.

Beyond that 10,000 mark are the "rare words" and these play a critical role in reading. The
eventual strength of our vocabulary is determined not by the common 10,000 words but by how
many "rare words" we understand.

If we don't use these rare words very often in conversations, where do we find them? The
chart below shows that printed text contains the most rare words.
   
Number of Rare Words Met Per Thousand
listening    reading

Adult to child, 6 mos. 9.3

Adult to child, 3 yrs. 9.0
Adult to child, 10 yrs. 11.7
Adult to adult 17.3
Prime time TV 22.7
Child's book 30.9
Adult book 52.7
Comic book 53.5
Pop. magazine 65.7
Newspaper 68.3
Scientific paper 128

Whereas an adult only uses 9 rare words (per thousand) when talking with a three-year-old,
you'll find three times as many in a children's book, and more than seven times as many in a
newspaper. As you can see, oral communication (including a TV script) is decidedly inferior to
print when building vocabulary. As soon as the chart moves to printed material (children's book),
the number of rare words increases significantly.

This poses serious problems for at-risk children who watch large amounts of TV, hear fewer
words, and encounter print less often at home. The result is a gigantic word-gap that impedes
the child's reading progress throughout school. Furthermore, the gap can't possibly be
breached in 120 hours of summer school, as some propose.
Regular family conversations will take care of the basic vocabulary (common lexicon), but when
you read to the child you leap into the rare words that help the most when it's time for
school and formal learning. Simultaneously, you're familiarizing the child with books and print
in a manner that brings him or her pleasure.

Why read to older children?

Every time we read aloud to a child or class, we're giving a commercial for the pleasures of
reading. But unlike McDonalds, we cut our advertising each year, instead of increasing it. The
older the child, the less he is read to—in the home and in the classroom. Typical is a Connecticut
school's 1990 survey of its fourth- through sixth-grade students in a middle class community:
only eight percent of the students had been read to the previous evening. Most teachers
confirm similar findings in their assessments of students in middle and upper grades. A thirty-
year survey of graduate students confirms how seldom they were read to in middle and upper
grades.

Will my students understand the book?

According to experts who have studied children's listening skills, it is a reasonable assertion,
based upon numerous observations, that reading and listening skills begin to converge at
about eighth-grade. Until then, they usually listen on a higher level than they read on.
Therefore, children can hear and understand stories that are more complicated and more
interesting than anything they could read on their own—which has to be one of God's
greatest blessings for first-graders. The last thing you want first-graders thinking is that what
they're reading in first grade is as good as books are going to get! First-graders can enjoy
books written on a fourth-grade level, and fifth-graders can enjoy books written on an seventh-
grade reading level. (But please also understand that is contingent upon the social level of the
book's subject matter; some seventh-grade material is above the fifth grader's social
experience and might be off-putting.)

All material is adapted from www.trelease-on-reading.com and The Read-Aloud Handbook.