Prosody Awareness

 This week, the podcast “The Importance of and support of Intonation During Silent Reading” with Dr. Jennifer Gross, discussed how prosody combine with silent reading help children's fluency between the ages 5 and 8.  Prosody is described as a rhythm or a melody when speaking. As we communicate verbally, students encounter prosody in everyday, regular speech. However they may night realize this concept. Children are also exposed to melody in speech when they read silently and while being exposed to other media. Two of the most common areas for children are within relationships and classrooms. Everyday, children speak to family members, friends and other community members using different tones for each relationship. Teachers also change tone and prosody throughout the day. For instance, teachers may change their toe when disciplining a child, versus rewarding the child.  In print, children can see changes in tone and prosody with repeating words, words that use all capital letters. Children are exposed to prosody every day however, we want to emphasize how to teach it in the reading curriculum.

Prosody is a concept, which bilingual, multicultural, or nonnative speakers can relate. For example, Brazilian Portuguese phrase such as: “Tudo bem.”  and “Tudo bem?” are written the same. However, It is all in the intonation that determines whether it's a question or a statement. The former translates to: “Everything is good.” and the latter translate to “Is everything good?” or “How are things?”

For children, storytelling goes along way with prosody.  For example, in the film, "A Little Princess", the children listening to the story are falling asleep until a young girl named Sarah begins reading the book with prosody. At that moment, the children became much more interested in paying attention. Interest will encourage young readers to read as well as make meaning and learn fluency while reading. In this case, the children would be interested in this application because they might want to tell the story to someone else.

This can be a universal strategy that can help children across cultures and ages. It bridges interests, fluency and meaning making. As Dr. Gross suggested, reading is unnatural according to science and takes instruction. Therefore, these aids are important for us to model to children in a way that will help them get excited about reading. Another interesting take from the podcast is that we can take prosody practice a step further by exposing babies to read alouds before birth. If babies are learning prosody in the womb, we can use this opportunity as a tool to help set children up for instruction once they reach school age.