Reading Together

This book is about how adults can facilitate children's learning to read. It emphasizes that the crucial role of the teacher is to sustain, encourage and facilitate the child's self-activated learning. It is important that the adult and child are reading together from an interesting book meaningful to both rather than being concerned with the isolation and teaching of skills. The adult-child interaction has to be one of genuine sharing and this sharing provides the basis from which the child's literacy can emerge. Robin Campbell traces a sequence of reading together from story reading (adult reads to child) to shared reading (adult and child read together) onto hearing children read (child reads to adult) and finally to sustained silent reading (child reads to adult). To support this sequence he suggests practical activities for teachers and children, and provides a number of classroom case studies as exemplars.