Learning & Development: Reading - Willing and able?

Whether it is applying for a passport, scanning the football pages, or reading the works of a great philosopher, modern life demands adequate literacy skills. However, a worrying number of people struggle with reading, and many are concerned about the growing gap between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots'.

Government-prescribed and legally-binding curricula bringing adult values into what used to be the sacred world of childhood seek to address this gap, such as the Early Years Foundation Stage, with its mandatory focus on early literacy development from age four and five.

From here the reasoning seems to go something like: 'The earlier you begin, the better you'll become. And the more you read, the more you'll learn, making you a more productive and worthy citizen'. Although much of this may be true, the idea that 'the earlier the better' applies to reading needs closer consideration.

Not everyone agrees that an early introduction to reading is necessary or appropriate. Many countries and alternative educational approaches prefer to leave reading until children are older than much of the English-speaking world does - until around age six or seven. A valid question then arises: what are the main lines of evidence in favour of an early emphasis on learning to reading?

One of the key arguments for early reading is that children who enter school with lower reading skills (for example, knowing fewer letters of the alphabet) perform more poorly in reading during primary school. However, this argument confuses two issues: children who enter school with lower literacy skills usually have poorer language development as well, or come from more disadvantaged homes. In and of itself, learning the alphabet in pre-school is unlikely to give a meaningful advantage (1). 

Another argument stems from early reading interventions, such as sound-to-letter focused (phonics) programmes. For children in the first two years of school these can improve reading in the short term (2). But after 15 months or so, the effect has reduced by about a third (3). What's more, these studies seldom look long-term at reading progress. Four years after the intervention was given, are these children actually better readers?

A recent report by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, on how children performed at age five in the early years curriculum, suffered from the same pitfalls as the research described above (4). Although the authors were systematic and careful in their report, they concluded that children who were in the EYFS for longer did better.

This may be true in some of their analyses, but the reasons why were less clear. The children who spent longer in the EYFS tended to come from more privileged homes, so it is difficult to say what the key ingredient was. Also, these more privileged children did slightly better only on teachers' EYFS evaluations. It would have been preferable if the report had looked at performance on independent measures.

THE SACRED COW

So, what would the ideal study look like? This study would compare groups of children learning to read early with those who did not, over an extended period of time. Surprisingly, only a handful of studies have actually done this. This means that what one anonymous reviewer described as the 'sacred cow' of educational psychology - the belief in 'the earlier the better' for reading - has hardly been tested.

In the 1970s there were a couple of studies, one in Germany (5) and one in the USA (6). In both studies some children experienced an early curriculum with a reading component and some did not. Not surprisingly, those who had the early reading classes did better at reading for the first year or two of school. After that, there were no differences in reading performance.

More recently, large-scale international reading studies have provided an opportunity to see how children's reading develops in different countries depending on whether pupils start school at age four, five, six or seven. Again it looks as if the earlier beginning at reading does not result in greater reading long-term (1, 7).

Finally, there is research from Rudolf Steiner schools, where reading is not taught until children are around seven. Before this time, children are in kindergartens where they learn through play, language and imaginative activities. By the time these Steiner-school children begin formal learning at seven, they are certainly well behind their age-matched peers in reading, but they have similar development of important language skills. These children go on to achieve at least equivalent levels of reading achievement to children who have had up to two years of intensive extra reading instruction (8). The more capable readers appear to have caught up by age nine and the less capable before age 11.

To express it differently, with a later beginning it took about three years for the average reader to reach the level that the earlier beginners took five years to reach. Although more research would be helpful, particularly with children from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds, the claim that reading should be a heavy component of pre-school classrooms, or even for five-year-old children, simply cannot be upheld.

READING AND LANGUAGE

To make sense of what many see as surprising findings, here are six reasons why 'the earlier the better' does not apply to reading:

1. Reading is not like language, in that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that a dramatic 'sensitive period' exists. There is no window in which reading needs to be learned or else be forever shut.

2. There is also a large body of research suggesting that early and later language is the backbone of reading comprehension. Language is a complicated skill that undergoes development well into adulthood.

3. In contrast to language skills, reading skills such as learning the alphabet, the sounds that go with letters, and how to read sentences, can develop quite quickly. Under the right conditions, it is probably a question of months or years, not decades.

4. Many people forget just how much children learn through activities that have nothing to do with reading, such as play, having imaginary friends, and talking with their parents or siblings. These experiences relate to language development and thus may indirectly improve a child's reading later on.

5. If we look at what is really important in reading, we have to say that children need good skills at deciphering text PLUS good language, and good cognitive and learning skills (such as ability to reason, good memory, motivation and holding attention). Not only do language and cognitive skills take much longer to develop than reading, they develop well regardless of whether children can read or not.

6. Reading skills themselves are easier to learn for older children. We know this because children who are older at school entry often do better in school (9). Probably, older children's greater language and cognitive development gives them a slight edge that they maintain.

ABLENESS IS NOT READINESS

What, then, does the ineffectiveness of early reading mean for the education of young children? Essentially, it is time to make distinctions between what children may be able to do, what others want them to do, and what will really benefit them.

Ableness is not readiness. Just because some children can learn to read, it does not mean that they will gain special benefit from doing so. This would lead to a shift in thinking away from focusing on narrow aspects of reading skills, such as learning the alphabet, towards broader language skills.

Instead of teaching reading to disadvantaged pre-school children to improve their reading in the long term, it may be better to focus on activities that foster language development, or even play or experientially learning about the world around them.

READING AND LANGUAGE

There is one more point to be made about the process of research, which is supposed to underlie trendy rhetoric about new educational policies being evidence-based. In science there is a guiding principle, which underlies all investigation. For early reading, this guiding principle would dictate that early reading must be assumed to have no long-term effect, unless there is proof to the contrary.

Unfortunately, many scientists and policymakers are simply not playing the game by their own rules when they continue to call for, and implement, ever earlier reading programmes. It is little wonder that an exasperated professor in Germany, Rainer Dollase, described the belief in the effectiveness of early reading programmes as 'a case of ignorance and research amnesia' (10).

Dr Sebastian Suggate is Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Wurzburg

REFERENCES

1. SP Suggate, International Journal of Educational Research 48, 151 (2009)

2. LC Ehri, SR Nunes, SA Stahl, DM Willows, Review of Educational Research 71, 393 (2001)

3. SP Suggate, Developmental Psychology (in press)

4. 'Quality, Outcomes and Costs in Early Years Education', carried out by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research on behalf of the Office of National Statistics, is at www.ons.gov.uk/ about-statistics/methodology-and-quality/ measuring-outcomes-for-public-service-users/ early-years-education/index.html

5. H Schmerkotte, Bildung und Erziehung 31, 401 (1978).

6. D Durkin, Reading research quarterly 10, 9 (1974-1975).

7. WB Elley, How in the World Do Students Read? IEA Study of Reading Literacy (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, The Hague, 1992).

8. SP Suggate, E Schaughency, AE Reese, Manuscript submitted for publication (2010)

9. PA Puhani, A M Weber, Empirical Economics 32, 359 (2007).

10. Dollase, Zeitschrift fur Padagogische Psychologie 21, 5 (2007)