The Relationship Between Family Reading And Children’s Reading Comprehension

The young child wants to learn. His whole reality is a constant discovery of a new world for him. In all this process, books, letters and words play a fundamental role, as they will powerfully attract your attention, although reading comprehension will still take a while to appear.

It is very likely that you have seen young children before a book making up stories because they still cannot read. In these moments, they interpret the drawings and imagine fabulous universes without limits beyond their creative capacity.

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

Once the child knows how to read, another new process arrives that not all parents take into sufficient consideration: reading comprehension. What role does the family play in this stadium? As we will see below, the family plays a fundamental role.

Reading comprehension of the child in the family environment

Research by authors such as Stevenson and Rasinski shows that the inclusion of 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 fluency development project, in which they involved family members of first-level students during a Primary Education course.

During the investigations, the progress of children with various abilities at reading levels was studied . All of them were randomly distributed between experimental groups and control groups.

Parents with children in the control group performed support tasks. They received orders and instructions from schools to do, among other tasks, occasional but not systematic readings with the children.

For their part, the children in the experimental group received training from their parents to enhance their reading fluency, using materials expressly recommended by the tutors and dedicating 15 minutes to the work each day.

The importance of family

According to the aforementioned study, the students who received specific help from their parents during the experiment period demonstrated positive results that were twice those of those children who did not receive such help.

The children who were helped by their parents showed greater capacity in word recognition, a task that they also did at a faster rate. They also showed more and better understanding and fluency in focusing their readings.

In addition, it should be noted that the children who participated in the research showed great enthusiasm for the experience, assuming significant enjoyment for them. In fact, they said they had learned to read better, to understand more difficult words more easily, and to learn with each new reading.

How the family can help

We have already proven the usefulness of the family collaborating in improving children’s reading comprehension. Now, what can you do about it? Let’s look at a possible proposal for action.

• The tutor will be the one who devises communication formulas with the family through informative notes, personal contact and periodic meetings that serve to enhance the reading work at home.
• Generally, parents do not usually have much free time. That is why it is necessary that the work towards reading fluency is limited to about 10 or 15 minutes a day, but constantly.
• Parents will receive training and will see demonstrations, since they are not professional teachers, to establish the program of development of the reading comprehension of their children.
• Parents will receive specific materials with which to work on reading fluency. It will be the case of poems, song books, riddles …, with the appropriate material. The improvement and the difficulty will be progressive and constant.
• It is interesting to do shared reading tasks that are simple, entertaining and short, so that they generate interest in the children.

• The teacher should prepare record sheets so that parents and educators can know the evolution of the work carried out.

We already know that the relationship between the family and the child’s reading comprehension is very important. Now, it is 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.