Teachers and parents usually call attention to the pictures when they read storybooks to preschool children. But a new study tells that calling attention to the words and letters on the book may lead to better readers. The two-year study compared children who were read to this way in class with children who were not. Those whose teachers most often discussed the words showed clearly higher skills in reading, spelling and understanding. Shayne Piasta, a professor of teaching and learning at Ohio State University, says most preschool teachers would need only a small change in the way they teach. They already read storybooks in class. The only difference would be increased attention to the printed words. Ms. Piasta says if you get children to pay attention to letters and words, _ that they will do better at word spelling. But she says studies show that very few parents and teachers do this in a systematic way. They watched more than three hundred children aged four and five in classrooms in Ohio and Virginia. The children came from poor families and were poor in their language skills. They may become bad readers when they enter primary schools later. Professor Justice says children's language skills can be improved by discussing with him or her when you are reading a book to a child. There are different ways that adults can talk to children about the letters and words on the page. They can point to a word and discuss the shape of it with a finger. They can point out a word: "This is 'dog'." They can discuss the meaning of the word or how the words tell the story. And they can also show how words are written left to right in English. What can we infer from the passage?
Parents are more important than teachers for little children. Teachers need to learn a lot to use the new teaching way. It's impossible for preschool children to understand words. Skills are important to children's reading development.