Marie Clay (1991) writes that when teachers read aloud to students “meanings can be negotiated in discussion before, during, and after the story reading” (p.171). Reading aloud to students should include think-aloud or interactive elements and focus intentionally on the meaning “within the text,” “about the text,” and “beyond the text” (Fountas & Pinnell, 2006, p.33). Read aloud, as part of the gradual release of responsibility, feeds naturally into shared, guided, and independent reading as teachers demonstrate for students the ways the reading process works (Burkins & Croft, 2010).
Among the many benefits of read aloud, Rog (2001) lists the following:
building vocabulary
developing understandings of story structures
supporting developing connections between print elements
encouraging high levels of understanding
teaching the reading process in a meaningful context
modeling fluency
motivating students to read