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Abstract |
In two experiments, classroom teachers in New Zealand read stories aloud to elementary school children, and administered pretests and posttests to measure the extent of the new vocabulary the children acquired from reading. Results showed that oral story reading constitutes a significant source of vocabulary acquisition, whether or not the reading is accompanied by teacher explanation of word meanings. In the first study, seven classes of 7-year-olds showed vocabulary gains of 15 percent from one story, three classes of 8-year-olds who received no teacher explanation showed gains of 15 percent, and three classes that did receive explanation showed gains of 40 percent. By contrast, the same groups produced gains of less than half these figures on a second story with different characteristics. Follow-up tests showed that this incidental vocabulary learning was relatively permanent, and that low-scoring children gained as much as high-scoring children. In addition, the features that best predicted whether a particular word would be learned were frequency of the word in the text, depiction of the word in the illustrations, and the amount of redundancy in the surrounding context. The author recommends future studies to investigate further the benefits from stories read aloud, and to clarify the factors that yield differences in children's interest in stories. |
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