The benefits of wordless books
You might have seen that some of the Book Dash books consist only of beautiful illustrations and don’t have any words in them. You might be wondering why. Wordless books have been shown to be useful for literacy promotion and development for many reasons:
- In many ways, books without words (but with a clear narrative structure) are shown to be more beneficial to critical thinking, comprehension, creativity and expressive language development than those with words (in South Africa, these skills are shown to be vastly under-developed in comparison to reading accuracy).
- One Early Childhood Development (ECD) practitioner explains the value of wordless books as follows: “We assist children to look at the pictures and to create their own story which gives the staff and teachers a better understanding of where the child is at emotionally and cognitively according to their age.”
- Many Foundation Phase teachers love wordless books, since they use them to build a bridge between reading, expressing and writing. They first get the children to read and tell the stories verbally (and all the stories will be different, because the children “read” the pictures differently and notice different things), and then they use the visual support and the verbal-telling to write their stories.
- There is also the added benefit that wordless books can be accessed equally by guardians who may be illiterate, and it enables them to still read with the children they care for, thus providing the emotional security and bonding that is so important.
- In multilingual contexts like South Africa, they have the additional value of transcending language barriers. For example, if you have children of many different languages and don’t have books for all of them in their home languages, giving them wordless books allows you to still reach all the children regardless of their language.
