Listening to children read

Listening to individual readers is a fairly recent phenomenon. Reading round the class or in unison was much more common in primary school classrooms up until the middle of the twentieth century. Following new thinking in psychology in the 1930s and 1940s, resulting in the development of graded reading schemes , teachers began to listen to children reading individually. The strategy was deemed to be particularly useful for the teaching of struggling readers who benefit from individualised support.