What’s more, the children who heard (and saw) repeated iterations of the words in the same stories retained the new words to a much greater degree than those who encountered the words (and objects) spread across different stories. The results, the researchers wrote, “provide good news for parents: it is not necessarily the number of different books that matter, but rather following requests to ‘read it again!’”
That will be some small consolation, I hope, if a child presents you, for the hundredth time, with a well-worn copy of Pip and Posy.
* * *
THERE IS A third important way that picture books foster an atmosphere rich in words. When an adult and a child sit together and leaf through pages filled with writing and artwork, it is a natural and easy time to talk. If the child is very young, the “conversation” may be one-sided and fairly primitive but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. It is. Every scrap of informal chatting that we do over picture books is fuel for the engine of language acquisition.
Academics who study the subject often cite a little fable known as “three mothers and an eggplant.” It is not a fairy tale—the eggplant doesn’t talk or grant wishes—but what it teaches, the moral of the story, is helpful in understanding how small interactions can produce big increases in a child’s vocabulary. The fable takes place in a supermarket:
The first mother wheels her shopping cart down the produce aisle, where her kindergartner spots an eggplant and asks what it is. The mother shushes her child, ignoring the question.
A second mother, faced with the same question, responds curtly, “Oh, that’s an eggplant, but we don’t eat it.”
The third mother coos, “Oh, that’s an eggplant. It’s one of the few purple vegetables.” She picks it up, hands it to her son, and encourages him to put it on the scale.
“Oh, look, it’s about two pounds!” she says. “And it’s $1.99 a pound, so that would cost just about $4. That’s a bit pricey, but you like veal parmesan, and eggplant parmesan is delicious too. You’ll love it. Let’s buy one, take it home, cut it open. We’ll make a dish together.”
So: three mothers, three distinct responses to a child’s simple question. The women’s replies help to explain why some children come out of toddlerhood knowing lots of words and concepts, and some do not. The first mother doesn’t engage the child at all. The second mother acknowledges the question, but shuts down further conversation. The third mother uses the query about an eggplant as a starting point for a disquisition on all things aubergine: the vegetable’s color, its weight, its price per pound, its flavor compared with that of a dish the child has tasted, and its relevance in the family’s life and diet.
What we see, with the third mother, is a kind of a three-dimensional, book-free version of a practice known as interactive reading or dialogic reading. Asking and answering questions, seeking and finding things in pictures, riffing on language, fooling around with alliteration or rhymes; all these are dialogic techniques. It’s like a form of play. And, as it happens, research tells us that children given the chance to hear and use vocabulary in a playful setting remember it far better than those who get straightforward instruction.
As Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, professor of education, psychology, and linguistics at the University of Delaware, told me, “The child learns best when they’re active, not passive. But you don’t want to turn reading into didactic teaching time. You want to follow the pointing finger, the little pointing finger, so that what’s on the page comes off the page and links up to the kid’s life.”
Even very young children will give clues about what interests them. They may whack the book, and bend it (“Hmm, what are the properties of this physical object?”). They may want to turn the page, or indicate the faces of animals or people, or, with that little pointing finger, trace the outline of a shape or a letter. The more they “read,” the clearer the hints they will give. That’s where the grown-up comes in, following the clues and improvising accordingly.
Caroline Rowland, professor of psychological sciences at the University of Liverpool in Great Britain, explained how dialogic reading should evolve. “If you’re reading with a one-year-old, you probably want to do factual stuff—you know, ‘Ooh, look at the doggie, can you see the doggie?’ and waiting for the child to point at something and then talking about what they’re pointing at and describing it,” she said. “But as your children get older, three to four, then you might want to change your interaction so that you’re doing more decontextualized talk.” This means unhitching the element of the story in question and connecting it to the child’s experience of the world.
“If there’s a doggie in the book, you can talk about the doggie you saw in the park, and that there are lots of different types of doggies,” Rowland went on. “The great thing is that you’re both focused on one thing, you know the child is interested because they’re engaged, and you can adapt your talk to whatever is going to be most effective given the age of your child, and how much language your child already knows. That’s one of the reasons it’s so effective. You can be very sensitive to your children’s developmental levels, and can keep boosting them a little bit further from where they are.”
The idea is to encourage conversation and interaction in a way that everyone enjoys and that offers bit of fun and challenge, like our old game of quizzes.
In themselves, picture books are objects worth talking about. There’s the front cover, to start with: What does it show and what feelings does it elicit? The endpapers may be designed and decorated so as to establish a mood or to plant an idea before the story begins. That’s worth talking about, too. Then there’s the story itself, and the illustrations, and the limitless possibility of things to wonder and say about them. A parent might linger over a picture and ask the child to find everything that is red, or square, or liquid; to name the parts of the body, or identify different pieces of fruit. A mother might teach her child the names of animals in both English and Japanese (assuming she studied it for longer than I did) or in Spanish or Tagalog or Korean. The two could practice counting objects up to ten together, or counting back down from ten to zero. A father could ask a child to find objects that are “on top of” or “inside” or “underneath” other things, to develop an awareness of spatial concepts. To stretch a child’s vocabulary, adults might use baroque description, as I liked to do, to add a layer of decoding to the process of locating and identifying objects in the illustrations.
Many picture books come with the principles of dialogic reading already built into them. Often questions will be tucked in amid the illustrations: “Which mountain goat is happy?” or “Whose baby is getting a bath?” All a grown-up need do is open the book, say the words on the page, and presto: he or she is expanding a child’s world and his ability to understand and describe it.
As productive as talking may be, sometimes a moment of quiet is in order. One father told me that he likes to stop reading now and then to give his young son a chance to think about the story, and perhaps to comment. Open-ended questions are good, too. Picture books such as The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, by Beatrix Potter, Virginia Lee Burton’s retelling of The Emperor’s New Clothes, or Mac Barnett’s Sam and Dave Dig a Hole give ample opportunity for the child to come up with his own thoughts and opinions. Parents can encourage this along with an occasional, gentle “I wonder why?” or “What do you think about that?”
One woman told me that when her two children were small, she used story time to impart deliberate lessons. In particular she wanted to help them develop a skill known as auditory discrimination. It is the ability to distinguish different sounds—the subtle contrast between the sounds of “t” and “d,” for instance—that children need when it comes time for them to learn to read on their own. The woman told me that she would sit in a rocking chair with the toddlers on her lap. “I’d say, ‘Can you find something in this picture that begins with the same sound as the word “dinosaur”?’” Sometimes she had them clap when they heard a spe
cific sound, which they thought was hilarious. Over time, using these techniques, she taught them initial consonant sounds, went on to initial blends (that is, combined consonant sounds such as “bl” or “sk” at the start of words), and even led them on to the confusing terrain of long and short vowels. Without the children realizing it, their mother was equipping them for preschool. From their point of view, they were all just having a happy time together before she tucked them into bed.
* * *
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN children are old enough, and adept enough, to read to themselves? Well, then they can read to themselves, and that’s terrific. But it doesn’t mean that reading aloud somehow fades in relevance. On the contrary: it retains its many powers—to enrich, enlighten, transport, and transform. To me, the serious joy of the thing begins when reader and listener can meet each other in substantial, demanding stories that will repay the effort required to read them a thousand times over in richness of language, of character, and of lasting imaginative effect.
I do want to say a word here about effort. It takes time but is otherwise not very taxing for most adults to read a handful of picture books, though, heaven knows, there are nights when even one short book feels like an imposition (“Go the f**k to sleep!”). Reading every day, or close to it, takes discipline when children are little. It takes a real act of will as they get older and other claims begin to encroach on the time they have at home. Schoolwork, sports, friends, part-time jobs, and the hydra-headed temptations of technology will try to crowd out regular reading. Don’t let it. This is a battle worth winning.
Children and parents can have full lives in cyberspace and in unplugged reality and find time to meet in literature. We don’t have to give up our devices. If anything, reading together allows us, and our children, to live in easier harmony with our machines. It gives us a time every day when we can reconnect in a low-pressure way and enjoy a little bouquet of neurochemicals, even as the books we read fill our children’s minds with ever more sophisticated language. Making the time to read together is almost an obstinate act of love. The mutual effort—the sacrifice of time—becomes part of the reward.
Stick with it, and the compensations are extraordinary. The baby girl who lifted the flaps of Rod Campbell’s Dear Zoo becomes the toddler charmed by Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline, who turns into the sixth-grader listening openmouthed to Mark Helprin’s A Kingdom Far and Clear, who grows up to be the young woman swept away by Leo Tolstoy and the beautiful, ill-fated heroine of Anna Karenina.
Each book makes straight the path for the next, opening out into sunlit literary meadows where, over time, young people will encounter beautiful writing and characters and scenes that may have been loved, known, and remembered by generations long since passed. For the child or teenager (or anyone else, for that matter), getting these tickets to Arcadia is a matter of simplicity. All they have to do is listen.
Most of us understand far more words than the ones we use in daily speech. We know this is true from the example of babies, who can show that they understand simple language long before they have the power to engage in it. We know it from children who are late to speak. For that matter, even dogs have shown under MRI scanning that they can comprehend certain words, regardless of the speaker’s tone of voice.
A child’s receptive vocabulary, the words he can understand, is thought to be anywhere from one to three years ahead of his expressive vocabulary, the words he can use. This means that by ear he can grasp and appreciate narratives that would otherwise be outside his scope of competence. As Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, points out, a child’s reading level doesn’t typically catch up to his listening level until about the eighth grade. An adult reading aloud does far more than impart a story, therefore: he or she also shows by tone of voice, phrasing, and pronunciation how complicated sentences can be tackled, subdued, and enjoyed. And while all that is happening, the child is soaking up fresh ideas and unfamiliar words.
“Students don’t learn new words by studying vocabulary lists. They do so by guessing new meanings within the overall gist of what they are hearing or reading,” observed E. D. Hirsch, a former professor at the University of Virginia who is perhaps best known for his 1987 bestseller Cultural Literacy. “And understanding the gist requires background knowledge. If a child reads that ‘annual floods left the Nile delta rich and fertile for farming,’ he is less likely to intuit the meaning of the unfamiliar words ‘annual’ and ‘fertile’ if he is unfamiliar with Egypt, agriculture, river deltas and other such bits of background knowledge. . . . Vocabulary-building is a slow process that requires students to have enough familiarity with the context to understand unfamiliar words. Substance, not skill, develops vocabulary and reading ability—there are no shortcuts.”
As a child is collecting words, he’s also picking up usage norms and the approximate rules of the grammatical road. “There’s a hidden form of vocabulary for kids when they’re reading, that is syntactic complexity,” educator Doug Lemov recently told an interviewer. “When you ask kids about a difficult passage, often times they got one of the ideas within a sentence, but the sentence was incredibly complex and multifaceted and so they didn’t understand how all the ideas in the sentence connected. There’s too much syntactic complexity for them.”
Lemov went on to describe his experience of reading a well-known novel by Scott O’Dell to his young daughter. “There’s nothing that she can read to herself that is like the complexity and depth of the narrative of The Island of the Blue Dolphins, which is just truly a great novel,” he said.
So I think that I’m selling her on the act of reading books, great books, by reading something that’s beyond anything that she’s ever imagined a book could do, and I think that for the rest of her life she will be changed by the experience of that book.
The key to me is that I was reading her a variety of ornate sentences that are probably more advanced than most adults use in their everyday work lives, hundreds or thousands of them in a row, as a second-grader. And by expressing them, I helped her to understand what they sounded like, which is why there were comparatively few moments of lack of understanding.
This phenomenon opens the way to one of the most exciting and underappreciated satisfactions of reading aloud: that you can, as a parent, share intricate, powerful stories with your children, and they will understand. You can see it—the clouded, uncertain look of the child who is tuning out and a little lost, for sure, but also the strange energetic gleam in the aspect of a child who has just stepped out into one of those sunlit meadows. It is stupendous. You can’t see what he’s seeing, but you can tell that he’s enchanted.
A capable reader of eleven or twelve might have a real struggle making his way through the subordinate clauses of a nineteenth-century novel, if he tried it on his own. Yet let that same child relax in an armchair while someone else takes on the text, and he’s free to experience what becomes a seamless and thrilling whole. Vocabulary, syntax, plot, characterization: all these dry ingredients combine to form a rich and immersive experience. And if there is a moment’s confusion, a word mistaken, or an idea that needs explanation, you can pause to supply what’s needed. That’s the beauty of contingency both when a child is small, during dialogic reading, and when he’s older, and the two of you are taking on bigger books.
Not long ago, Flora asked me to read Bram Stoker’s Dracula to her. Told through letters, diary entries, and newspaper clippings, the story is full of complicated and obscure language (not surprising in a novel first published in 1897). I was prepared for her to lose interest. She didn’t. She was gripped. At the age of eleven, she took the archaisms in stride, and she did not seem to mind or even notice passages that struck me as convoluted or windy. With the young lawyer, Jonathan Harker, she met Count Dracula in his looming castle. She traveled with the monster, sealed in his repulsive box filled with earth, on a doomed cargo ship bound for England. She listened, rapt, as the count fed at the throat of Lucy; visited his
mad disciple, Renfield; and attacked Mina, Jonathan’s bride. As the story swept on toward its end, Flora rallied with the forces of good—Jonathan, Mina, Quincey Morris, Dr. Van Helsing, Lord Godalming, and Dr. Seward—as they traveled to Transylvania, formed three parties, and fanned out across the countryside, determined to stop Dracula from regaining his castle.
Flora drank in every word, and she would have listened for hours every night, rather than just the one I could give her. As we neared the end, though, she began to worry. She’d been around books long enough to suspect that Bram Stoker would kill off at least one of his heroes in the final confrontation. Who would live and who would die? She chewed her fingertips.
“I know it’s going to be Quincey! Because he’s so nice, but he’s not as important.”
She fell silent for a moment, and then gasped. “And Van Helsing! Because he’s old! And he said he was willing to die for Mina!”
We grimaced at each other—the suspense was killing us—and I picked up the book again. Flora leaned forward in her chair, as if trying, like that little girl, Ella, to climb bodily into the story. Now Mina Harker and Dr. Van Helsing were making camp by themselves in the Carpathian wilds. In a horrible development, Count Dracula’s three female companions materialize near them in the gloom. The horses are screaming with fright and tearing at their tethers, but the two travelers are safe within a protective charm. By the time dawn breaks, the spectral visitors have vanished, and Mina is fast asleep.
“‘I fear yet to stir,’” Van Helsing says in his imperfect English. “‘I have made my fire and have seen the horses; they are all dead. Today I have much to do here, and I keep waiting till the sun is up high; for there may be places where I must go, where that sunlight—’”
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