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19th December 2018
07:06pm GMT

"Practise makes perfect and that’s never truer than when it comes to reading. Though you may have read your child’s favourite book two hundred times and know it off by heart, it’s a price worth paying to give them the gift of words."Recent research shows just how vital it is to share books with small children. Professors Peter Cooper and Lynne Murray, from the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading traveled to Cape Town's Khayelitsha, one of the South Africa's poorest townships, to train local mothers to share picture books with their infants. The team also trained participants in techniques such as pointing and naming things on the page. The team discovered that the attention span of the children involved in the weekly training sessions more than doubled. The methods also resulted in increased vocabulary and improved comprehension, both of which can boost the educational prospects of children in the world's poorest places.