Lois Letchford: Why Do I Focus on Students Listening to Books?

Listening to a book is your complete overview of a book. It allows you to go, ah, these are the characters, these are the challenges, these are the problems that they faced. The who, what, how, when, where, and why. And it should be an enjoyable experience. Hello, my name is Lois Letchford. I teach children who have failed numerous reading programs. My job is to teach them to read, and my channel has been looking at and reading lots of books to children over the past 12 to 18 months. And today I want to talk about why this is so important, why the focus on having students listen to books. We know we want our children to be fluent readers. From my perspective, reading involves more than just decoding words. Books require a lot more cognitive load, a lot more information coming in, working on the child's brain, than does a simple sentence or a reading passage. And there are 3 components. And the body on the bottom, I've got the definition of fluency, and it says fluency is a combination of the ability to read with accuracy and Accuracy. Every word that's on the page. No additions, no omissions. Expression, prosody. How are they reading these sentences? Is it word by word? Or is it as you would expect the sentence to flow? Help students strengthen their comprehension. Now, reading books does so much for every child. Testing fluency, unfortunately, is far too easy. But I do not want— just want fluency. I want fluency and comprehension. We cannot make assumptions about a student just reading words and getting an accuracy test. That does not help us with the child who is struggling with reading. And this comes from the internet, and I think from Reading Rockets. It's the holistic approach that we're going to here rather than just the explicit skill. We need explicit skills, but we then, we need to go to the whole and we need to switch between the whole, the part, and back to the whole. And here we've got down the bottom again fluency, prosody, the ability to read with expression, accuracy in reading, and then automatic word meshing. Recognition or creates the fluency. Listening. Listening to a book gives you a complete overview of the book. It allows you to go, ah, these are the characters, these are the challenges, these are the problems that they faced. The who, what, how, when, where, and why. And it should be an enjoyable experience. After listening, I require my students to go back and reread the chapter. The child is now required to reread every sentence independently. Do they have greater understanding now? You're increasing a child's vocabulary through listening. And this is huge. It's huge. You're getting them to build connections. You've got exposure to new word and have a background to what is happening in the story. They still have to go back and read, like I said in the first sentence here, reread every sentence, and that's what is critical. The more a child listens, the greater their reading growth, and this is where we can close the gap. It actually helps change the brain. It allows the children to take in what they're listening and produce it and reread something else. It sounds simple. I'm not just promoting listening. I am promoting everything that is required— skills and listening— and it's going between the two. But the listening allows them to make sense of the skills. And it does change the child's brain. My book, Reversed Memoir, tells the phenomenal story of young Nicholas going from non-reading to graduating high school in the top 20% of his class. And the biggest thing— or there's multiple lessons from his story, but one of the huge components of growth in his reading growth from a child who had— the schools had zero expectation was that he listened for hours on end. Now, before he picked up these books, he was reading independently. He could read the Goosebumps series. He would take 5 hours to read one Goosebumps book. You can tell that his reading speed was incredibly slow, but he was reading for meaning. He could come to me and he'd say, listen to this, listen to this, this is really funny. He could do those things. And then to get him to going from this below grade level to grade level and above occurred through listening. And I'm not even talking about 1 hour a day. I'm talking about on weekends, 8 to 9 hours. When we would drive outside of Lubbock, which was where we were living at the time, you've got the growth. Hours, hours, 10 or 12 hours of listening. As he played with his K'Nex, there was always an audiobook going on in the background. It requires time to go from the bottom to the top, and listening is one way to do it. So subscribe to the channel, listen to the stories that are there. You don't have to do it with a book, just listen and enjoy. Connect with me, Lois Letchford. at lois@loislatchford.com. Thank you. If you enjoyed this video, please be sure to leave a like and subscribe.