Learning & Development

Booki is ideally suited to supporting your child's langugae and literacy development at home and at school. Here's an overview of some of the benefits of Booki observed by English Langugae Teaching (ELT) expert Paul Dummett.
 

Pedagogy

Reading while listening (RWL) is known to:

  • Yield better comprehension results than either reading or listening in isolation
  • Increase reading speed
  • Aid word recognition (both written and spoken)

The idea that each individual has a preferred sense for learning – a more auditory or visual or kinaesthetic learner – has been debunked as a neuro-myth and replaced by the view that we are stimulated by multi-sensory learning – more of a kind of learning experience, if you like. So combining sound with text and images (and, say, acting out stories) makes for deeper learning. Images are a key component in this multi-sensory approach, since images are the principal means by which we store memories.   
 

Intensive and extensive

Intensive reading (and listening) involves being given a text to read and then answering comprehension questions about it. Extensive reading means reading simply for enjoyment:  the reader chooses what, when, where and how much to read. Both are necessary to acquire reading and listening skills, one more explicitly the other more implicitly (Dornyei:  “the challenge for language teaching methodology is the maximise the cooperation between implicit and explicit learning”). As a reading resource, the Booki app gives opportunities for both intensive and extensive reading.   
 

Techniques for parents

BEFORE

  1. Use the title and the pictures to speculate about the story. You can also do this page by page with a picture story.
  2. Talk about similar stories or subjects  (e.g. Elmer the Elephant, ask them if they know any elephant stories, what they know about elephants etc).

DURING

  1. After they have heard the text on a page, ask the child to find an individual word on it.
  2. Pause the audio and try to prompt the next (key) word from the child.
  3. Get the child to read and listen in the other room; then periodically to run through to you and update you on what is going on in the story before going back to listen to more.
  4. Pause the audio after a piece of dialogue, and get the child to imitate the voices of the characters.

AFTER

  1. Ask general, open questions about the story: Did you enjoy it? Why? Did you like the ending? etc.
  2. Get the child to write a one sentence summary of the story or a very short comment on it.