From our Literacy Specialist
The Value of Repeated Reading
Did you know that several areas of our brains are involved in the process of reading?
When learning to read, what we are asking our young learners to do is no small feat. They must essentially build a complex network of connections between sounds/spoken words, visual information in the form of letters, and the meaning centre in their brains. The pathways we create in order to be able to successfully read are not formed without practice and are actually not part of natural human evolution.
Here are two videos if you would like to learn a little more:
Longer scientific explanation - 4 minutes
As we learn to read, it is often standard practice or experience from our own schooling that leads us into the old “change your take-home book every day” routine. Each day, our early readers take on loads of new information and work very hard to apply it as they tackle the texts that they are presented with, at school and at home. Our students are making amazing, long-term changes to the wiring in their brains. Understandably, this impressive task might require more repetition than many of the daily tasks we might be able to master.
What we might be missing in this old habit of presenting a new book to early readers each day is the value in seeing the same words repeatedly, within the same sentence structure, and attempting to pull them off the page another time or two. The repeated viewing and hearing of the same words can provide a further opportunity to link the sound, visual and meaning components of the word within our brain. Thus, forming stronger connections.
Repeat reading of the same materials may be able to positively impact on the likelihood of committing new words to long term memory, so that they can be automatically recalled once mastered. We don’t want to read a book until it is memorised without looking, but we do want to have another go at it with some familiarity and an opportunity to engage further with its meaning and how the words look and sound. We also gain an opportunity to work more closely on fluency and expression once the words have been decoded a time or two.
So, perhaps you might consider encouraging your child to read the same text a couple of times over a couple of days, or even a couple of times on the same day. Every little opportunity adds up, and over time we build pathways that we don’t even consciously think about. It’s like riding a bike!
Hats off to all our incredible little brains taking on this massive task right now. Reading is a pretty special talent and it is one we put loads of effort and commitment into at RNPS.