The benefits of wordless books
Wordless books are a powerful tool for literacy promotion and development.
They have a number of benefits, including:
- They can invite more interaction and more complex discussion during book sharing, because parents are less bound by the text on the page.
- They can spark more parent elaborations, questions and feedback, more child contributions and more interaction than picture books with text.
- They support richer interactions about characters’ mental states.
- They develop children’s critical thinking, comprehension, creativity and expressive language. In South Africa, these skills are vastly underdeveloped in comparison with reading accuracy.
Books without words are particularly powerful in South Africa and other countries where many caregivers are not skilled readers or lack confidence to read aloud. Even illiterate caregivers can “read” a wordless book, which supports attachment and bonding. They can also transcend language barriers, and ensure all children are included in multilingual contexts.
How our partners use wordless books
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 emotionally and cognitively according to their age.”
Many Foundation Phase teachers also love wordless books, and use them to build a bridge between reading, expressing and writing. They first ask children to tell the story out loud (and all the stories will be different, because the children “read” the pictures differently and notice different things), and then use the pictures and the verbal -telling to write their own stories.
