Nursery World - EYFS: Best Practice - All about ... dialogic reading

Adopting the dialogic approach to reading with a child will help
parents, and practitioners, to advance the child's oral language. Joan
Kiely explains the method and its importance.

Young children who can express themselves well and have a good store of oral vocabulary are stepping into the world of learning with a great advantage. They can better understand themselves and others, they can better make their needs known, they can better interpret what is going on around them and they can better share their experience of the world.

One way to develop children's oral language is to read stories to them and chat about the story as you read it. By simply sitting together in a quiet space with a child, cuddling up for a few minutes and focusing on a story together, parents and early years practitioners are not only improving child-adult relationships but familiarising the child with a type of language that is not heard in everyday conversation. This is referred to as decontextualised language and is important for a child's development.

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