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Research Paper: Effects of Reading to Infants and Toddlers on Their Early Language DevelopmentReading begins the journey through one's language development stages, and the language development begins with reading to our children. Reading to young children is essential to early literacy, language development, and reading readiness. Reading to an infant gives him or her comforting contact. As well as establishes an early reading routine, and this helps make future reading comfortable and fun. As an infant becomes a toddler and older, reading opens him or her to new ideas. It helps the child become m ...view middle of the document...
Research has shown that parents who follow their child's lead and use language related to their child's interests tend to have children with more advanced vocabularies (Lowry, 2011). Books spark children's interest because they have illustrations with bold colors and topics of interest to young children. Many children's books offer imaginary topics (such as pirates, princesses, or dragons) that encourage conversation between parents and children. In addition, it's easy for children to show their parents what interests them in a book, both with and without words (by pointing, gesturing, or drawing attention to a picture). As a result, books motivate children to communicate and when parents respond to what the child is interested in, it helps the child learn new words.Lastly, it's not enough to simply use new words during conversation or read them in a book. Children need to learn what words mean. Books can help parents teach children what words mean because: parents can use the illustrations to explain the meaning of new words, the conversations that occur while looking at a book offer opportunities for parents to pause the story and explain what a new word means and books often use the same new word on several pages of the book. This provides several opportunities to hear a new word used in a variety of sentences, and this helps children understand the word's meaning (Lowry, 2011).Reading aloud to young children and language skills go hand in hand. Studies demonstrate a relationship between oral language skills such as vocabulary, syntactic (the way in which linguistic elements such as words are combined to form sentences) and semantic (focus on the meaning of words or sentences) processes and narrative discourse processes such as memory, storytelling and comprehension and reading ability. All of these contribute to word recognition and reading comprehension (Zuckerman, 2008).I stand firmly behind research in regards to reading and early language development. I have been able to personally experience this in my practicum experience. One of my activities I completed with the child and on several different occasions is reading a book. On one particular occasion, I completed a read...
