Picture Stories to Delight and Instruct Young Readers and Language Learners
SPEAKING PICTURE STORIES add speaking voices to children’s picture stories so that early and emergent readers can hear and enjoy the written text with or without a teacher or parent. This lets children work at their own pace, supporting differentiated learning in the classroom. Speaking picture stories expand a young reader’s word recognition, pronunciation, fluency, and comprehension, whether he or she is a native speaker or English language learner.
Speaking picture stories also let young children hear and understand second languages. Stories in another language will familiarize young children with the sound and look of that language, and expose them to vocabulary, pronunciation and simple sentences. This means that parents and teachers don’t need to speak a language in order to introduce their children and students to it. We like to imagine a kindergarten where young readers can read a story in both their native language and in the languages of their classmates. Or a world in which all children can read stories in any language they choose.