Reading storybooks aloud to children is recommended by professional organizations as a vehicle for building oral language and early literacy skills (International Reading Association & National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1998). Reading aloud is widely accepted as a means of developing vocabulary (Newton, Padak, & Rasinski, 2008), particularly in young children (Biemiller & Boote, 2006). Wide reading is a powerful vehicle for vocabulary acquisition for older and more proficient readers (Stanovich, 1986), but since beginning readers are limited in their independent reading to simple decodable or familiar texts, exposure to novel vocabulary is unlikely to come from this source (Beck & McKeown, 2007). Read-alouds fill the gap by exposing children to book language, which is rich in unusual words and descriptive language.
The recommended practices outlined in the K-3 Essential Instructional Practices are:
Utilizing conceptually-related sets of texts
Modeling fluency (accuracy, automaticity, rate, and prosody)
Giving child-friendly explanations of words within the text using movement, photos, or other examples
Incorporating higher-order discussion before, during, and after reading
Explicitly teaching instructional strategies which include print concepts, word recognition, knowledge of the structure and features of text, comprehension strategies, and vocabulary