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This is why picture books are so important for improving listening comprehension for young children. It gives them something to focus on so that hearing words t
by jacobolus 7y ago
This is why picture books are so important for improving listening comprehension for young children. It gives them something to focus on so that hearing words they don’t understand or new grammatical constructions is less distracting, it provides visual cues related to some of those words and helps guide understanding of the story, and it gives the children and whoever is reading to them something to point at in discussion. It also makes the stories more appealing and makes repeat readings more rewarding.
I would guess (based on not-too-rigorous anecdotal experience) that the optimal level of word familiarity for most rapidly improving listening comprehension when read-to 1:1 is closer to 90% than 98% (but with the caveat that books should be re-read several times). The big difference is that having someone to talk to makes it very quick and easy to ask what words mean and discuss other aspects of the story.
When read to for an average of 1+ hour per day, young children improve at listening comprehension very quickly.
- dredmorbius 7y agowhy picture books are so important Any references on this? Interesting.
- jacobolus 7y agoI am just talking about my own experience. But there are thousands of papers about early language development (which I have not read). You could start with a google scholar search like https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=storybook+OR+%22picture+book%22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=storybook+OR+%22picture...
- dredmorbius 7y agoOK. Was wondering if that was research based or just personal experience. The hypothesis makes sense, but I'd love to see it substantiated.
- kd5bjo 7y agoI’ve been looking into the research on second language acquisition a bit, and the primary mechanism for learning a language appears to be hearing/reading understandable sentences for content, rather than structure. When learning, some sentences in the text will make sense to you and others will be out of your reach. I suspect that the role of pictures (or any other context) is to help correct your mental state of the narrative world so that the sentences you don’t understand don’t present an impassable barrier, preventing you from getting to the later sentences that will help you learn.