Reading aloud to a child who does not have the words yet
The instinct is to simplify, translate and check. All three make the session shorter and the learning smaller.
Reading a picture book to a child who is new to English feels, at first, like reading to someone through a wall. You say a sentence, they look at you, and you have no idea how much of it landed. The natural response is to make the language easier — swap the hard words, shorten the sentences, stop and translate, and ask a question at the end to find out whether it worked.
Each of those instincts is reasonable and each one costs you something. Simplifying removes the rich language that is the reason to read a book rather than a worksheet. Translating trains the child to wait for the translation. Checking turns a comfortable ten minutes into an assessment. There is a version of this that is easier for you and much better for them.
Let the pictures do the translating
A picture book is a bilingual text already. The words are in English and the pictures are in a language every child on earth reads fluently. A learner who does not know the word 'ladder' will know exactly what is happening if the picture shows someone climbing one, and the word attaches to the meaning without either of you naming it.
This changes what you do with your hands more than what you do with your voice. Point at the thing as you say the word. Not every word — that becomes a lesson — just the one that carries the sentence. The pointing is doing the work that translation would have done, without the cost of routing the meaning through another language first.
Read it the same way you would to anyone
The urge to flatten the language is strong and worth resisting. Rich text is not an obstacle for a learner, it is the supply. A child cannot acquire vocabulary and sentence rhythm they never hear, and a book edited down to the words they already have gives them nothing to reach for.
What you can change without losing anything is speed. Read slower, put a real beat of silence at the end of each page, and let the pause do what an explanation would have done. The child is processing the sentence, the picture, and your face all at once, and all three of those are teaching. Rushing is the thing that actually costs comprehension, not difficulty.
Reread the same book far more than feels reasonable
For a first-language reader, rereading is comfort. For a language learner it is the entire mechanism. The first time through, a child is working out what is happening. The second time, knowing the plot, they have attention free for the words. By the fifth time they are anticipating phrases and mouthing them, and somewhere around then the phrases start turning up in their own speech.
This is the single highest-value habit in the whole business, and it is also the easiest to sell to a tired adult, because rereading is less work than reading. One book ten times will do more for a learner than ten books once, and it costs you less.
Stop checking comprehension
The question at the end — what happened in the story, what was the boy's name, why was she sad — converts the activity from something a child wants into something a child is graded on. For a learner who is already anxious about producing English, that conversion is expensive and it does not buy much, because a child can understand a story perfectly and be unable to summarize it in a second language.
If you want to know whether it landed, watch instead of ask. Do they turn the page at the right moment. Do they laugh before you get to the funny bit. Do they bring the same book back tomorrow. Those tell you more than an answer would, and they cost the child nothing.
One word, not a glossary
There will be a word the picture cannot carry and the story genuinely turns on. Handle it, briefly, and then go back to reading. A gesture, a quick synonym they already know, or yes — a single word in their home language if you have it. Using the home language occasionally is a tool, not a failure; using it as the default is what trains a child to stop listening in English until the translation arrives.
The limit is roughly one per reading. If a book needs five, it is the wrong book for now. Put it back and try it in a month, when it will probably be the right one.
The thing that makes read-aloud so effective for language learners is that it is the rare activity where a child gets a large amount of real language with none of the pressure to produce any. That combination is hard to manufacture and it is sitting in every picture book on the shelf.
Slow down, point at things, read it again tomorrow, and do not ask them what it was about. That is most of it.