Why Reading Skills Matter: A Guide to Boosting Your Child's Future
From deciphering classroom instructions to navigating the complexities of future careers, reading permeates every aspect of our lives. For children, mastering this fundamental skill is not just about academic success; it's the key that unlocks their educational journey and shapes their future possibilities. Therefore, nurturing and diligently monitoring the development of strong reading skills in their early years is of paramount importance.
The Profound Benefits (and Costs) of Reading Proficiency
Why is Good Reading So Important?
Our ability to read acts as a constant companion, influencing everything from a child's access to education to an adult's achievements in the professional world and their capacity to navigate daily life. Ensuring children develop robust reading skills during their formative educational years is not merely beneficial – it's crucial.
Accessing the Whole Curriculum:
Developing strong literacy through reading is fundamental for children to become proficient communicators, both in writing and speech. These foundational skills are not limited to excelling in English lessons; they are the bedrock upon which success is built across the entire curriculum, from early learning stages right through to advanced qualifications like GCSEs and A-Levels. Children who struggle with reading risk being left behind in all subjects.
The Reading Framework underscores this, setting the ambitious goal that "by the end of year 6 pupils’ reading and writing should be sufficiently fluent and effortless for them to manage the general demands of the curriculum in year 7, across all subjects and not just in English".
The undeniable importance of reading in "unlocking the curriculum" is reflected in the Department for Education's (DfE) proposed levelling-up missions:
To have 90% of year 6 pupils achieving the expected standard in reading, writing, and maths by 2030.
To increase the average national GCSE grade in both English and Maths to 5 by 2030.
In 2023, only 60% and 45.3% of pupils met these targets respectively [3, 7]. Achieving these goals, however, is projected to yield significant whole-economy benefits, estimated at £31.1bn - £59.6bn for the KS2 target and £34.3bn for the GCSE target for a single cohort in 2030.
Supporting Adults in Their Careers and Everyday Life:
The significance of reading confidence and ability extends far beyond a child's school years. It is vital that as many young people as possible leave education at 18 with the reading skills necessary to navigate their daily lives effectively and to open up a wide array of future career paths, including access to further education and professional training.
Adults with poor literacy skills, particularly in reading, face a higher risk of unemployment. A 2021 government report highlighting the need for further education reforms emphasized the urgency of addressing current skills shortages – equipping employers with competent staff and enabling adults to secure and advance in their careers. Alarmingly, a 2017 survey revealed that approximately one-third of businesses were dissatisfied with the basic literacy skills of their young applicants.
Beyond employability, poor reading skills can also significantly impact earning potential and career progression. Studies indicate that an average worker with weak literacy skills earns around £1,500 less per year than someone with basic literacy.
The Power of Reading Aloud in Developing Strong Reading Skills
So, we understand why strong reading skills are crucial. But how can we effectively cultivate these skills in children? One powerful tool is the simple yet highly effective practice of reading aloud.
What Exactly is Reading?
To understand how reading aloud helps, it's important to define what reading entails. The national curriculum aligns with the "Simple View of Reading," a model proposed by Philip Gough and William Tunmer in 1986. This model breaks down reading into two key components: decoding (word reading) and language comprehension.
Decoding (word reading) involves:
Reading unfamiliar words by sounding out the individual letters and blending those sounds together, either silently or verbally. This process relies on explicit phonics instruction, where children learn the relationship between sounds ('phonemes') and the letters or groups of letters that represent them ('graphemes').
With sufficient practice and exposure to phonics in various linguistic contexts, proficient readers develop the ability to recognize familiar words accurately and automatically, without consciously sounding them out.
Language comprehension refers to:
The ability to understand the meaning of individual words, sentences, and the broader context of what is being read or heard.
Essentially, it's the process of deriving meaning from written or spoken language.
For children to become successful readers, they need to develop proficiency in both decoding and language comprehension. However, as the reading framework highlights, "once pupils can decode accurately and speedily, reading a lot is the principal way they develop as readers."
How Reading Aloud Fosters Decoding and Language Comprehension Skills
Reading aloud offers a multitude of benefits that directly contribute to the development of both decoding and language comprehension skills. Let's explore some key ways it achieves this:
How Reading Aloud Supports Decoding Skills:
Phonics and Word Recognition: While explicit phonics instruction in Key Stage 1 is foundational (evident in the significant improvement in word recognition following the introduction of phonics screening checks, with 89% of pupils meeting the expected standard by the end of KS1 in 2023), reading aloud reinforces these skills. By vocalizing words, children encounter phonemes in diverse contexts, strengthening their recall of letter-sound relationships. The act of producing the sounds themselves, rather than just visualizing them during silent reading, aids in internalizing these mappings, particularly when encountering unfamiliar words.
Fluency Development: Fluency acts as a crucial link between decoding and comprehension. A fluent reader reads accurately, at an appropriate pace, and with correct intonation (prosody). The Standards and Testing Agency (STA) suggests a reading speed of around 90 words per minute as a good fluency benchmark for KS1 pupils. Reading aloud actively helps children:
Regulate their reading speed to avoid hesitant stumbling.
Engage more consciously with punctuation to achieve natural-sounding speech.
Practice applying stress and intonation, making the reading process more engaging and meaningful. Greater fluency also enhances reading enjoyment, naturally encouraging children to read more frequently.
Oracy and Speaking Skills: Reading aloud simultaneously strengthens oracy skills – the ability to express oneself clearly through spoken language. Surveys indicate that pupils who would benefit most from increased speaking activities include those with English as an Additional Language (EAL) (73%), disadvantaged pupils (71%), and pupils with low attainment (68%). Reading aloud provides a valuable platform to develop these skills, particularly for children from language-poor environments with fewer opportunities for rich conversations.
Building Confidence: Confidence can be a significant barrier to engaging in reading and public speaking. In 2021, only 45% of children reported feeling confident in their reading, a notable decrease from 53% in 2016. Reading aloud, especially in a supportive and private setting, allows children to build confidence independently before potentially reading in front of their peers.
How Reading Aloud Supports Language Comprehension:
Closing the Vocabulary Gap: Before children learn to read independently, their vocabulary develops primarily through speaking and listening. However, children from language-poor households often hear significantly fewer words than their peers, leading to a substantial "word gap" that can reach tens of millions of words by the time they start school. For instance, studies show that children from literacy-rich households who are read to regularly will have heard approximately 1,483,300 words by age five, compared to just 63,750 words for those read to only a few times a week. Reading aloud can help bridge this gap by exposing children to a wider range of vocabulary and reinforcing new words through the act of speaking them.
Improved Retention and Recall: Reading comprehension relies heavily on the ability to retain and recall information. Research consistently demonstrates that children remember words and information more effectively when they read aloud compared to reading silently. One study found that children recognized 87% of words read aloud versus 70% of words read silently. This phenomenon is attributed to the "production effect" – the combination of the motor activity involved in speaking words and the auditory input of hearing them spoken, which strengthens memory encoding. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) recommends oral reading as a strategy for enhancing comprehension, and studies suggest that oral language training leads to significant improvements in reading comprehension.
Key Takeaways: The Distinct Advantages of Reading Aloud
While both reading aloud and silent reading contribute to building "reading miles," which the reading framework emphasizes as crucial for developing reading skills, reading aloud offers unique and significant advantages:
Supports phonics progress: Reinforces phonics knowledge through active speech production.
Develops fluency: Helps children read more naturally with appropriate pacing, stress, and intonation.
Improves oracy skills: Enhances spoken language abilities, particularly beneficial for disadvantaged pupils.
Builds confidence: Reduces anxiety associated with public reading and speaking.
Enhances retention and recall: The "production effect" leads to better memory of words and information.
Given these compelling benefits, reading aloud deserves a more prominent role in national reading strategies. An increased emphasis on incorporating reading aloud within educational frameworks and curricula could significantly boost children's reading proficiency, confidence, and overall language development, ultimately unlocking brighter futures for them all.
