Loud reading as a didactic tool to empower reading text comprehension

Listening to stories and the brain processing of narrative material activates many areas in the brain, not just those of language processing. In this sense, it could be assumed that this activity, especially in the years of development, if inserted with continuity within the school curricula, can bring benefits at the level of understanding of the text, but also of basic basic cognitive dimensions. In a series of studies with different age groups, we wanted to investigate the effects of intensive training of narrative listening, through different tools, such as standardized tests of comprehension of the text. Method A total of 98 students from different schools participated in 3 studies. Groups were created on the basis of age and the fact that they were in parallel classes, doing the same type of activity during the school year. The selected groups were homogeneous in terms of general cognitive skills, socio-economic extraction and no social psychological problem had been highlighted. The training consists of 60 sessions of reading aloud of the experimental group (duration from 15 minutes - up to an hour each, with daily frequency, five days a week). At the beginning, texts were used characterized not only for their general brevity, but also for the structure of the period, articulated in short sentences so that the comprehension was accessible. Progressively, texts characterized by longer semantic units and longer overall duration have been inserted. We proceeded in a similar way as regards the level of linguistic difficulty, so in the last part of the training we used texts that were not exhausted in a single day of reading, thus requiring children to remember the contents of the "previous episode". The tests used to verify the possible increases in performance in the comprehension of the text were the INVALSI tests, PIRLS tests and the AMOS battery study tests.