The Relationship Between Family Reading And Children’s Reading Comprehension

Children want to learn. Their entire reality is a constant discovery of a new world for them. During this entire process, books, letters and words play a fundamental role, as they will attract your full attention. While reading comprehension still takes a while to emerge, family reading can be a wonderful tool to work with.

You’ve probably seen small children in front of a book making up stories because they don’t know how to read yet. In these moments, they interpret the drawings and imagine fabulous universes, without limits, far beyond their creative capacity.

However, during this early development, the child will gradually learn to read, that is, to interpret the symbols that are letters and that together produce words that have a clear meaning for him.

When the child already knows how to read, he starts another process that not all parents consider: reading comprehension. What is the role of the family at this stage? As we will see below, the family plays a key role.

The child’s reading comprehension in the family environment

Research by authors such as Stevenson and Rasinski shows that including parents in improving children’s reading fluency during the early stages of learning to read is justified and should be supported.

Rasinski and Stevenson studied the effects of parental involvement in a reading comprehension development project in which they involved family members of first graders during an elementary education course.

In these analyses, they studied the progress of children with various abilities at reading levels. Furthermore, all of them were randomly distributed between experimental groups and control groups.

Parents with children in the control group performed support tasks. They were instructed by schools to carry out, among other tasks, occasional, but not systematic, readings with the children.

In turn, the children in the experimental group received training from their parents to improve their reading comprehension, using materials expressly recommended by the researchers and dedicating 15 minutes a day to work.

The importance of family reading

According to the study cited, students who received specific help from their parents during the period of the experiment had positive results twice as high as those of children who did not receive this help.

Children who were helped by their parents showed greater ability in word recognition, a task they also did more quickly. They also demonstrated a better understanding and fluency in their readings.

In addition, it should be noted that the children who participated in the survey showed great enthusiasm for the experience, feeling significant pleasure. In fact, they claimed to have learned to read better, to understand more difficult words more easily, and to learn with each new reading.

How can the family collaborate

We’ve already proven the importance of the family in collaborating to improve children’s reading comprehension. So what can we do? Let’s look at a possible action proposal.

• The teacher will create formulas for communicating with the family through informative notes, personal contact and regular meetings that serve to improve the reading work at home.
• Parents don’t usually have a lot of free time. Therefore, it is necessary that the work in favor of reading comprehension be limited to about 10 or 15 minutes a day, but constantly.
• As they are not teachers , parents will receive training and attend various demonstrations to establish their child’s reading comprehension development program.
• Parents will receive specific materials to work on reading comprehension. It will be the case of poems, songbooks, riddles… all with the appropriate material. Improvement will be progressive and constant.

• It is interesting to carry out shared reading tasks that are simple, enjoyable and short, to generate interest in children.
• The teacher must prepare record sheets so that parents and educators know the progress of the work performed.

We now know that the relationship between family and child’s reading comprehension is very important. So it’s up to us, as parents and caregivers of our children, to work in the right direction to promote the optimal development of the little ones.