The objectives of study were: (1) To study the impact of the reading of children’s literature on the decoding skills and the reading comprehension skills of the advantaged and disadvantaged children of standard I. (2) To study the impact of the reading aloud of children’s literature on the listening comprehension of children in the experimental group. (3) To assess and compare the active use of literary language by the children in the experimental group before and after the intervention of reading aloud of children’s literature. (4) To study the attitude of the teachers in the experimental groups towards reading aloud of stories and techniques of story reading in the classroom. (5) To determine the effectiveness of interactive reading of children’s literature by this experiment.
The hypotheses of study were: (1) Experimental group pupils (advantaged and disadvantages) of standard I who read aloud children’s literature regularly will receive higher reading comprehension scores than the pupils in the control group who had no such exposure. (2) There is a positive relationship between the children’s exposure to reading aloud of children’s literature and the reading skill of the child in standard I. (3) There is a positive relationship between the child’s exposure to children’s literature and the child’s active use of literary language.
The sample comprised of 120 standard I children from eight different intact classrooms of four Marathi-medium primary schools of the P- ward. The sampling technique used was Stratified Random Sampling.
The tools used were: Reading Readiness Test (RRT), Picture Story Telling Test (PSTT), Reading Test (RT), Attitude Scale for Teachers, and Interview Schedule for Parents.
The study was experimental research, which followed an experimental control group design (quasi experimental design).
The data were analyzed with the help of statistical technique like Paired t-test, independent t-test and percentages.
The findings of study were: (1) There was a significant difference between the experimental and control groups on the post-test scores of the Reading Test (RT). The intervention group’s scores increased while the control group’s scores decreased on the post-test. (2) The reading aloud of children’s literature appeared successful in increasing the students’ ability to read with comprehension. (3) The exposure to children’s literature increased the scores of Reading Comprehension of the children in the experimental group. (4) The exposure was also found to result in more fluency of words and sentences and usage of long sentences with sophisticated and more accurate story structure as seen on the Picture Story Telling Test (PSTT) administered before and after the interventions. (5) The finding supports the effectiveness of the reading aloud of children’s literature in the classroom as an easy effective supplementary to conventional method of teaching reading.
Keyword(s): Reading Skills, Advantaged and Disadvantaged Children, Standard I , Systematic Reading, Children’s Literature