The impact of reading aloud project on preschools
Simone Giusti, Andrea Mancini
This contribution constitutes a focus on the interviews carried out with 22 preschool teachers, who participated during the year 2019/2020 to the project Leggere: Forte! Aloud Makes Intelligence Grow, which aims to make reading aloud a usual, intensive, and daily practice, in the entire system of education and instruction in Tuscany to reduce, over time, school dropout and ensure a real possibility of educational success for all. Teachers were selected and identified according to a precise methodology and criteria that allowed the identification of potential «excellences» in reading practices. From these semi-structured interviews conducted by the project research team, a correlation emerged between the perception of the positive effects of reading and the project activities, which seems to have caused significant changes within Tuscan preschools. Therefore, beginning with the explicit and direct references, the positive impact of the project actions on reading practices in the following areas and the consequent changes perceived and reported by the teachers themselves are discussed: increased attention span, interest, and anticipation from children; regularity and constancy of the reading activity; autonomy of reading (reading detached from other activities); confidence in the efficacy of reading; involvement of the families; and the importance of the instruments provided for monitoring the activity.
Keywords
Reading aloud, Teachers, Preschool, Teaching, Change.
