Shared Reading

Shared Reading is an interactive literacy practice where a facilitator reads a text aloud to a group, engaging participants in discussion and reflection. This method is often used in educational settings to promote reading comprehension, vocabulary development, and a love for literature. It allows participants, including both children and adults, to experience stories collectively, fostering a sense of community and shared understanding.

In Shared Reading, the chosen texts can vary widely, accommodating diverse cultural backgrounds and reading levels. The facilitator typically encourages participants to respond to the text, ask questions, and express their thoughts, making the reading experience more enriching and inclusive. This approach not only enhances language skills but also promotes critical thinking and empathy as listeners connect with different perspectives within the stories.

Shared Reading can be particularly beneficial in settings like schools, libraries, and community centers, where individuals from various backgrounds come together. Overall, it serves as a valuable tool for building literacy skills while celebrating diversity through literature.

Published in: 2021

By: Joseph Dewey, PhD

Subject Terms

Shared Reading

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

Shared Reading is a teaching concept for creating an interactive classroom as a way to help introduce basic fluency competencies and reading skills to students. Although Shared Reading strategies have been employed with students at all grade levels, the concept focuses most often on pre-kindergarten to second grade students. A culture-wide decline in reading at home has put pressure on the classroom to provide effective introductory reading experiences. At the center of the Shared Reading pedagogy is the concept that students at an early age should see the words being read to them.

Overview

The theoretical basis for the Shared Reading concept was first proposed in the early 1980s when educators first began to notice a significant drop in student reading comprehension skills and a drop generally in student interest in reading itself. Television had been an alternative form of home entertainment since the 1950s and had been blamed by critics for all sorts of cultural changes, including student performance. Toward the end of the twentieth century, other screen technologies, most notably the first generation of computers and video games, began to monopolize children’s attention to the detriment of reading. Surveys found that a shrinking number of homes had books and that many parents did not spend shared reading time with young children, thus relegating reading to school work.

Story Time and Sustained Silent Reading. Traditionally, the approach to introducing reading in school was premised on two foundational concepts. First, it was known that children loved to be read to, an educational paradigm borrowed most obviously from the dynamic of a bedtime story (Ong, 2014). Reading to very young students involved gathering them around the teacher on mats and inviting them to listen to stories, fables, or folk tales and showing illustrations in picture books. “Story time” was not perceived to be an element of the school curriculum in that nothing was being taught. Rather, reading was presented as a kind of break from school time, like lunch or recess or naptime.

Word construction, sentence dynamics, and the discipline of fluency—that is, reading skills such as pace, inflexion, and accuracy in pronunciation—were taught later, after a love of books and the desire to read had been instilled. Early reading instruction, before students could be “hooked,” was seen to be unnecessarily overwhelming, whereas children endowed with a foundational love of reading were believed likely to become lifelong readers.

A second premise predicted that an effective early years classroom reading program would produce students who enjoyed the act of holding a book, turning pages, and blocking out the distractions of the “real” world. Reading, under this rubric, was a joyfully, exuberantly private act. It was termed silent sustained reading (SSR) and was used in classrooms as an exercise to build reading as a regular habit. It was also sometimes called into service as a kind of impromptu study hall while a teacher attended to other business, reinforcing the idea that enforced idleness could be wiled away with a book.

Few metrics, however, indicated that endeavoring to foster a love of reading in this way actually succeeded in creating a broad culture of enthusiastic adolescent readers, and often young book lovers were stigmatized by their peers as socially awkward, aloof, or arrogant. For most kids, reading was a chore done only in connection with school work.

The Shared Reading Model. Although Shared Reading is a relatively contemporary movement in language arts, its premise is as old as literature itself. Reading was historically a community event largely because for centuries literacy was a relatively rare talent. The Shared Reading theory suggested that early reading as an activity should be returned to a group setting. According to this model, children would help each other discover reading, without feeling intimidated or isolated. Students would collectively and collaboratively build reading confidence, and that confidence would help ensure that reading would become part of their adult skill set.

After generations of schoolchildren being read to (or more accurately, at), proponents of Shared Reading redefined reading as an activity in which the schoolchildren would participate. With the endorsement of the Barack Obama Administration and zealous advocacy by the National Teachers Union, Shared Reading became the guiding vision or at least a component of just under 80 percent of K-12 public schools nationwide. More than a dozen major schoolbook publishers sponsor entire lines of texts appropriate to the approach, thus making Shared Reading the most successful teaching innovation in the humanities over the last quarter century.

Applications

The actual operation of a Shared Reading program varies from school district to school district, and even from instructor to instructor. The protocol allows the opportunity for teachers to modify the program to match their personalities and teaching styles and at the same time meet their students’ particular needs. The general format, however, does center on several basic features. Reading time is not set apart like a break from the school day or as a chance to relax. Rather reading is part of the daily curriculum. It is a lesson, and it is not done silently or individually but as a class or group.

The students are given the chance to move from their desks to an assigned spot in the classroom, usually centered on a big chair, where the teacher sits and the students are seated on the floor comfortably close to either an easel or a computer projection screen. Books are not selected for their stories or for their absorbing characters or action. Rather the topics are pedestrian, for example, going to a circus, planting trees, going on an airplane ride, investigating what noses do, or visiting a museum. The point is not to distract the students with enthralling storylines. Shared Reading books will teach the students about words, sentences, fluency, and comprehension. Students are expected to follow along, with the teacher pointing out the words being read aloud (Eniger, 2011).

First, the instructor introduces the book, which is oversized and in a large, easy to read font. The instructor shares the title and asks what the title might suggest the story is about, thus getting students curious about the reading. The instructor opens the book and shares the information on the title page, emphasizing that the writing has an origin—that is, a person wrote it, a publisher printed it, a distributor sold it. This approach significantly impacts how a child comes to understand what exactly a book is—its form and how it comes into existence (Sim & Berthelsen, 2014).The instructor then either affixes the book to a handy easel or runs the text through a software program so that it appears overhead on a screen.

The first time through the instructor reads clearly, slowly, with careful enunciation, sweeping eye contact, and careful pace, but not dramatically and theatrically as that reduces the session to entertainment. The instructor can stop at any point and toss out a discussion question, ask the students what they think might happen next. The teacher’s intention is to keep students interacting with the reading and not allow it to become a listening (or sleeping) exercise.

The instructor then re-reads the text. This time, however, the students help. Blewitt and Langan (2016) cite specifically the importance of mutual support from peers in Shared Reading lessons. Because the print is large and easy to read, the instructor can pause at critical words and help students say the word they are actually looking at. Reading thus becomes a shared activity. Because of the group activity, individual students who may be struggling can find critical support and guidance from their own peers. There are no tests or quizzes—this is reading in school not school reading.

Most often, the second reading would end the first day session. When the class returns to the text in the next lesson, the text is highlighted by the teacher, often using sticky notes, according to what particular reading fluency skill the instructor wants to highlight. For example, the session could focus on what is termed decoding, that is defining specific vowel or consonant sounds and/or phonetic combinations; introducing new vocabulary words; or reviewing grammatical constructs such as subject-verb agreement. In each case, the reading this time would incorporate specific competencies. Sentences could be isolated and students given the chance to practice fluency skills, that is accurate word pronunciation, pace, and appropriate expression. Teachers may, for example, can ask a student to read the sentence “like a robot” to suggest the importance of pacing and inflexion. The emphasis is on teacher/students interaction (Martucci, 2016), and the most significant benefit of Shared Reading can be the opportunity for students, regardless of competency level, to talk with the teacher in a non-threatening forum. Always, however, the teacher returns the students to the actual content of the text by asking direct questions that assess whether the text is understood. For example, if the story is about a child named Peter who goes to a county fair, instead of the teacher asking open-ended questions such as, “Have you ever been to a fair?” he or she might ask, “The first day Peter arrives at the fair, what is the first exhibit he sees?”

The template for Shared Reading units is one week. In many cases, the instructor provides a summary activity for the close of the session. The teacher can for the last session have the students do some activity connected to the text—for example, make a puppet of Peter or animal figures from the fair. Another extension might be to act out critical parts from the reading, as in a play, with a narrator and assigned parts to practice and enhance fluency skills. Students may be encouraged to take the teacher’s role and ask each other questions about the story that reflect the unit’s lessons. The goal is to end the unit in a way that allows reading to be an end in itself, the work of understanding the cooperation and collaboration between printed words and the voice and mind that animate them.

The techniques (and pedagogical assumptions) undergirding Shared Reading are manifested in reading programs and language arts curricula in later grades. In middle school and high school, for example, the concepts of Shared Reading are used to define small group activities within larger English classes that focus most often on grammar fundamentals using a part of a longer text the entire class is reading. Students at this age can be directed to read passages to each other (echo reading) or all together (choral reading) as fluency skills that can enhance speech skills.

In addition, Shared Reading concepts have been used to develop fluency competencies and reading comprehension skills in students for whom English is not their primary language. English as Second Language students, an increasing demographic in U.S. colleges, are given the chance, under an instructor’s direction, to work through learning critical English language terms, sounds, and sentence constructs as part of both their academic success and their long-term professional success in an increasingly global economy.

Viewpoints

The Shared Reading initiative is so basic, so fundamental that educators, parents, and politicians share a respect for the goals of the program. The program is itself relatively inexpensive to start up, an important consideration in an era of overcrowded, underfunded schools. The template is so flexible the model can be adapted successfully for autistic students (Arndt & Arciuli, 2015) and students with hearing impairment or loss (Girgin, 2013). The concepts can be nearly particular to each school or school system.

Boulard, Hoffman, Perron, Chamberland, and Roy-Charland (2015), however, raised disturbing questions after research showed that children, after several sessions of Shared Reading, begin to pay far more attention to the books’ illustrations and start to tune out the teacher altogether.

Shared Reading methods strive to make reading a pleasure, not a chore; to reimagine a classroom as a community; to encourage language skills that can endure for a lifetime; and to create a non-threatening environment in which children discover together the challenge and the rewards of reading. Although in the wake of digital communications some media and cultural critics predicted that reading would diminish, not only as a leisure activity but also as a necessary means of information transference, employers now rate reading skills as on par with in-field expertise when it comes to making critical hiring decisions. The continued relevance of literacy makes programs such as Shared Reading that target reading improvement a significant element of the early education experience.

Terms & Concepts

Choral Reading: A method of segmented literacy practiced in Shared Reading in which an entire class (or work group) reads a passage together.

Collaborative Learning: A theory of classroom engagement that sees student cooperation, rather than competition, as central to education success.

Decode: A method for introducing complex vowel and consonant sound patterns by isolating them within the words in which they appear.

Echo Reading: A method of segmented literacy practiced in Shared Reading programs in which the teacher reads aloud a passage and a student (or group of students) repeats the same passage aloud, focusing on pace, inflexion, and pronunciation.

Fluency: A template for measuring reading skills that encompasses both comprehending a text for its content and being able to read it aloud with correct pronunciations and emphasis.

Literacy Instruction: Methodologies practiced in school to encourage fluency.

Pedagogy: A model for teaching instruction that is premised on basic foundational principles.

Silent Sustained Reading (SSR): An approach to fluency enhancement, once prevalent, that centered on giving students class time to read to themselves.

Bibliography

Arndt, A., & Arciuli, J. (2015). Shared reading between mothers and children with autism or specific language impairment. Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology, 17(3), 120–124. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=110966520&site=ehost-live

Blewitt, P., & Langan, R. (2016). Learning words during shared book reading: The role of extratextual talk designed to increase child engagement. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 150, 404–410. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=118156650&site=ehost-live

Boulard, J., Hoffman, N., Perron, M., Chamberland, J., & Roy-Charland, A. (2015). “If I point, do they look?”: The impact of attention-orientation strategies on text exploration during shared book reading. Reading & Writing, 28(9), 1285–1305. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=109539320&site=ehost-live

Ediger, M. (2011). Shared reading, the pupil, and the teacher. Reading Improvement, 48(2), 55–58. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=508462980&site=ehost-live

Girgin, U. (2013). Teaching strategies for shared reading for children with hearing impairment. Eurasian Journal of Educational Research, 53, 244–268. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=91862047&site=ehost-live

Martucci, K. (2016). Shared storybook reading in the preschool setting and considerations for young children’s theory of mind development. Journal of Childhood Research, 14(1), 55–68. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=113031783&site=ehost-live

Ong, J. (2014). A tension between theory and practice: Shared reading program. Reading Matrix: An International Online Journal, 14(2). Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=99810572&site=ehost-live

Sim, S., & Berthelsen, D. (2014). Shared book reading by parents with young children: Evidence-based practice. Eurasian Journal of Early Childhood, 39(1), 50–55. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=95525106&site=ehost-live

Shared Reading

On this Page

Subject Terms

Shared Reading

Abstract

Overview

Applications

Viewpoints

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

Suggested Reading