What makes kids better readers

As your children get older, instilling a love of reading can be crucial to their language skills, independence, and emotional development. As your child is learning to read, or if they struggle with reading on their own, there are many things that you as a parent can do to help improve their abilities. Not sure where to start? Research indicates that setting aside time daily to read to and with your child can substantially increase their reading abilities in many areas, including:.

If your child has not yet learned to read, incorporating a daily story time routine into their schedule will instil the importance of reading that they will hopefully continue to appreciate as they learn to read on their own. As your child does learn to read on their own, you can continue your daily or nightly story time together.

Gradually shift the reading responsibilities to your child so that they are reading to you instead of the other way around. This will encourage them to read without your assistance, but allow them to do so in an environment where you are still able to help them to decipher unfamiliar or difficult words. There are two very effective ways to encourage your child to read regularly.

One is to make books available everywhere in your home. Lure your child into stories by having books on shelves or in baskets in rooms throughout your home.

Having books at their reading level available in the car, in the bathroom, next to their bed, and even in the living room next to the TV will signal to your child that reading is important and easily accessible.

Parents are the ultimate role models for their children, and yours are likely to emulate the behaviour that you display. If your child sees you reading before bed every night then they are more likely to do the same.

Likewise, when your child sees you reading for your own pleasure, they will see firsthand that reading is about enjoyment and not just about learning. If your child appears to be uninterested in reading, it may not be because they do not like to read.

The source of the problem could simply be that they do not like to read the books that they have. Try exposing your child to many different types of stories. The more interested your child is in the subject matter inside of a book, the more excited they will be to read it. Mysteries, science fiction, and adventure stories are particularly popular with young boys and girls with adventurous imaginations. To view the list of annotations, please scroll to the bottom of the page.

For almost a century, researchers have argued over the question. Most of the disagreement has centered on the very beginning stages of the reading process, when young children are first starting to figure out how to decipher words on a page. One theory is that reading is a natural process, like learning to speak. If teachers and parents surround children with good books, this theory goes, kids will pick up reading on their own. Another idea suggests that reading is a series of strategic guesses based on context, and that kids should be taught these guessing strategies.

Written language is a code. Certain combinations of letters predictably represent certain sounds. And for the last few decades, the research has been clear: Teaching young kids how to crack the code—teaching systematic phonics—is the most reliable way to make sure that they learn how to read words.

Of course, there is more to reading than seeing a word on a page and pronouncing it out loud. As such, there is more to teaching reading than just teaching phonics. Reading requires children to make meaning out of print. They need to know the different sounds in spoken language and be able to connect those sounds to written letters in order to decipher words. They need deep background and vocabulary knowledge so that they understand the words they read. Eventually, they need to be able to recognize most words automatically and read connected text fluently, attending to grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.

But knowing how to decode is an essential step in becoming a reader. It touches on what else should be part of early reading programs. Infants learn to speak 2 by listening to and repeating sounds made by adults and connecting them to meanings.

By contrast, children do not naturally develop reading skill through exposure to text. The way they learn to connect oral and written language 4 depends on what kind of language 5 they are learning to read. Alphabetic languages, like English or French, use letters to stand for sounds that make up spoken words. To read an alphabetic language, children must learn how written letters represent spoken sounds 6 , recognize patterns of letter sounds as words, and match those to spoken words whose meanings they know.

This differs from Chinese, for example. It uses a tonal spoken language, conveying meaning with small differences in stress or pitch. Its writing system is partially logographic—in which written symbols correspond directly to a word or concept—and also includes words that couple symbols for meaning and symbols for sound. While some young children may make those connections themselves, most do not. One set of studies from illustrates this phenomenon well 9.

Then, the researchers tested whether the children could transfer their knowledge to reading a new word. But children could succeed on this task if they were first given some explicit instructions.

When children were taught how to recognize that certain letters represented certain sounds, and taught how to segment words to identify those individual letters and sounds, they had much greater success on the original transfer test. Neuroscience research has since confirmed and helped explain these findings. When learning how to read new words in an unfamiliar made-up language, participants had more long-term success if they were first taught which symbols correspond to which sounds, than if they tried to remember words as wholes.

Brain imaging of these readers finds that the two teaching strategies tap into different neural pathways in the brain. Readers taught to connect print to meaning directly could recall words initially more quickly, but less accurately; readers taught to connect print to sound and then to meaning read aloud more quickly and correctly, better recalled the correct meanings of words, and transferred their knowledge to new words.

Decades of research has shown that explicit phonics instruction benefits early readers, but particularly those who struggle to read. Slow, capacity-draining word-recognition processes require cognitive resources that should be allocated to comprehension. Thus, reading for meaning is hindered; unrewarding reading experiences multiply; and practice is avoided or merely tolerated without real cognitive involvement.

The most effective phonics programs are those that are systematic. The National Reading Panel found this in 12 , and since then, further research reviews have confirmed that this type of instruction leads to the greatest gains in reading accuracy for young students A systematic phonics program teaches an ordered progression of letter-sound correspondences. Instead, they address all of the combinations methodically, in a sequence, moving on to the next once students demonstrate mastery.

Teachers explicitly tell students what sounds correspond to what letter patterns, rather than asking students to figure it out on their own or make guesses. In one series of experiments 14 , Stanford University neuroscientist Bruce McCandliss 15 and his colleagues made up a new written language and taught three-letter words to students either by asking them to focus on letter sounds or on whole words.

Later, the students took a reading test of both the words they were taught and new words in the made-up language, while an electroencephalograph monitored their brain activity. Those who had focused on letter sounds had more neural activity on the left side of the brain, which includes visual and language regions and is associated with more skilled reading.

Those who had been taught to focus on whole words had more activity on the right side of the brain, which has been characteristically associated with adults and children who struggle with reading. Moreover, those who had learned letter sounds were better able to identify unfamiliar words. Early readers benefit from systematic phonics instruction. Among students in grades K-1, phonics instruction led to improvements in decoding ability and reading comprehension across the board, according to the National Reading Panel Children at risk of developing future reading problems, children with disabilities, and children from all socio-economic backgrounds all benefited.

Later research reviews have confirmed that systematic phonics instruction is effective for students with disabilities, and shown that it also works for English-language learners Most studies of phonics instruction test its immediate effectiveness—after the intervention, are children better readers?

Among students in older grades, the results are less clear. A recent meta-analysis of the long-term effects of reading interventions 18 looked at phonics and phonemic awareness training, mostly in studies with children in grades K Both phonics and phonemic awareness interventions improved reading comprehension at an immediate post-test.

But while the benefits of phonemic awareness interventions persisted in a follow-up test, the benefits of phonics interventions faded much more over time. The average length of all interventions included in the study was about 40 hours, and the follow-up assessments were conducted about a year after the interventions were complete, on average.

Depending on the estimate 19 , anywhere from 1 percent to 7 percent of children figure out how to decode words on their own, without explicit instruction. They may spot the patterns in books read to them or print they see in their environment, and then they apply these patterns. It may seem like these children are reading words as whole units, or using guessing strategies to figure out what comes next in the story. Of course, phonics instruction—like all teaching—can and should be differentiated to meet the needs of individual students where they are.

For example, a child may see an illustration of an apple falling from a tree, and correctly guess that the sentence below the picture describes an apple falling from a tree. Many early reading classrooms teach students strategies to identify a word by guessing with the help of context cues. Cueing systems were designed by analyzing errors 24 rather than practices of proficient readers, and have not shown benefits in controlled experiments Moreover, cognitive and neuroscience studies have found that guessing is a much less efficient way to identify a new word, and a mark of beginning or struggling readers, not proficient readers.

Skilled readers instead sound out new words to decode them. Balanced literacy programs often include both phonics and cueing, but studies suggest cueing instruction can make it more difficult for children to develop phonics skills because it takes their attention away from the letter sounds. There is a general path that most children follow as they become skilled decoders.

Research can tell us how children usually progress along this path, and which skills specifically predict better reading performance. Before starting kindergarten, children generally develop some early phonological awareness—an understanding of the sounds that make up spoken language. They can rhyme, break down multi-syllable words, and recognize alliteration A next step in the process is understanding that graphemes—combinations of one or more letters—represent phonemes, the smallest units of spoken language.

There are other early skills that relate to later reading and writing ability as well 29 , regardless of IQ or socio-economic status. This practice will help teachers learn the strengths, challenges, likes, and dislikes of their students. Peers can be a great resource for helping students find what books they will love to read.

Encourage classmates to be book matchmakers by creating personalized book recommendations for their peers. It's easy to create a recommendation template that can be stacked in the class book nook. When students find a book they think would match the interests and hobbies of classmates, they can fill out the personalized book recommendation form and give it to their classmate. Literacy diagnostic tools such as running records or anecdotal notes can also be used to understand the instructional and independent reading levels of students.

Through daily guided reading, teachers can introduce students to high-interest instructional text across genres. Daily individualized reading practice gives students the opportunity to read books of choice on their independent reading level and grow as readers. Introduce children to multiple genres of books during small-group reading instruction. When children find a book of interest, they can turn the book into their choice book for independent reading time.

Background knowledge about a topic or subject matter can help students engage in the reading. For example, if a child has never been to a farm, he or she may not understand how the setting of the barn is crucial to the plot of a story that takes place on a farm.