Why read?
Reading as a Route to Language Proficiency and Learning
The habit of reading holds numerous benefits for students. Not only does reading enhance areas such as oral language, learning and cognition, but it also improves reading ability itself! Here are some of the positive differences books and reading make in the life of a reader:
Reading and Oral Language
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Strong early oral language skills support the ability to learn to read. When students come to school from language-rich home environments, they have a solid foundation on which to acquire early literacy skills. In turn, strong reading skills and the habit of reading support further oral language development, particularly by helping students learn the sophisticated vocabulary and complex grammar that are typically found in books but not in conversations. Students who read well and read a lot are positioned to use oral language more proficiently than their peers who do not read as a habit.
Reading and Vocabulary Development
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A major benefit of reading is the opportunity to grow one's vocabulary, and vocabulary size is consistently linked to students' overall academic performance. Children who are not read to in their early years come to school at a significant disadvantage compared to their peers who have been read to. Sometimes, even quality schooling does not close the vocabulary gap. When children are young, much of their vocabulary is learned through conversations with others, but as they grow older, new vocabulary will be acquired primarily through independent reading. A vocabulary enlarged through reading also improves reading comprehension: It's much easier to understand what you read when you know what the words mean!
Reading and Background Knowledge​
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A reciprocal relationship exists between reading and background knowledge (also referred to as general, real-world or prior knowledge), which is everything a student knows about the world and how it works, as well as personal experiences, beliefs and attitudes. Students who engage in extensive reading experiences, encompassing both fiction and non-fiction, develop a wealth of background knowledge, which, in turn, affects reading comprehension. Most of what we read requires us to 'read between the lines', filling in information an author leaves out, or to interpret what an author does say in light of what we already know. Students who lack the background knowledge necessary to do this cannot make sense of what they read to the degree that they need to. The practice of reading widely supports students' comprehension by bolstering their background knowledge.
Reading and Writing​
Renowned authors tend to have at least one thing in common: They are all voracious readers. When students read high-quality writing on a consistent basis, they imbibe the language that good writers use and are able to reproduce well-styled language in their own writing. Reading also provides students with models for writing in different genres. The language of a research paper is not the language of a book review. A student who wants to produce a well-written research paper will benefit from immersive reading of research papers. Additionally, reading supplies student writers with the ideas, or content, for their own writing due to the background knowledge that is built up through reading. It doesn't matter if students get the structural part of writing correct if they have no information to fill into that structure. Wide reading always informs a student's writing.
Reading and Foundational Literacy Skills
Habitual readers also become better than non-readers at lower-level reading and writing skills such as word recognition and spelling. The more students read, the more encounters they have with the same words. Seeing words over and over strengthens a reader's memory for those words. The implication for reading is that students become more rapid at word identification and more fluent, and greater fluency opens the door to better comprehension. Students are also likely to become better spellers as the repeated exposure to words helps them develop a mental picture of how those words should look when written down. The ability to read, once acquired, can therefore become a pathway to even stronger literacy skills if students choose to read on a frequent basis.
Reading and Cultural Literacy
Cultural literacy refers to a specific type of background knowledge - what everyone within a particular culture is expected to know. Culture can be broad or narrow, for example, encompassing the shared knowledge of a region of the world, a certain country or a community. Reading comprehension is negatively impacted when students encounter cultural references with which they are unfamiliar, such as allusions to works of literature. It is cultural literacy that enables readers to understand expressions such as 'the patience of Job', 'the strength of Hercules' and 'That's just sour grapes'. Understanding of vocabulary can also depend on cultural literacy; for example, the word jumper as an article of clothing can mean a sweater, a pair of women's overalls or a one-piece suit for babies, depending on where a person lives. All reading, writing and academic experiences occur in a cultural context, so students with greater cultural literacy do better academically. Reading widely exposes students to the knowledge shared by others within their culture and also provides a window into other cultures.
Reading and Learning
Reading is the route to much of the learning we do. No matter which subject a student is engaged in, she or he will be required to gain information through reading. This is why reading skills correlate with overall academic performance. Additionally, early and continued reading experiences develop students' ability to pay attention for sustained periods of time, enhancing school achievement. Reading also supports learning because it increases the level of knowledge that students bring to any learning task. Learning is essentially the expansion of knowledge networks in our minds; we learn when we integrate new information with our own prior knowledge and store it in long-term memory. When students read a text on a specialist topic about which they have no prior knowledge, the information may be quickly forgotten because it has little meaning. The more limited our prior knowledge, the more limited our learning. On the other hand, the more students know at the outset of any learning experience, the more they will learn. The so-called 'Matthew Effect' is true of students with regard to their current levels of knowledge: The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
Reading and Intelligence
Verbal intelligence is the ability to solve problems using language-based reasoning. The more language and background knowledge students acquire through reading, the more their verbal intelligence increases. Reading also has a positive effect on students' crystallized intelligence, which can be measured through vocabulary size and level of general knowledge. Emotional intelligence, which enables students to regulate their own emotions and behaviour and relate well to others, is also impacted by reading. The more language children have to express how they feel, the less likely they are to develop problems with conduct. Students with low emotional intelligence often experience behavioural and interpersonal issues that impede learning. However, reading, especially fiction reading, develops students' empathy, theory of mind (the understanding that other people do not have the same knowledge, thoughts and feelings that they do) and ability to consider multiple perspectives on an issue.
Reading and Cognition
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Cognition refers to the mechanisms by which we learn, and it involves concepts such as thinking, remembering, attention and long-term memory. Reading impacts our cognition in various ways. For instance, reading increases our prior knowledge, and our prior knowledge helps to determine what new information we attend to, how we make sense of it and whether or not it makes it into long-term memory. Reading experiences, such as being read to (or not) as children, also impact our vocabulary, and vocabulary is linked to cognition. Research shows that slow vocabulary development in young children under the age of 3 puts in place a slower cognitive pattern (Hart & Risley, 1995). Further, the inability to read can seriously undermine cognitive development:
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Slow reading acquisition has cognitive, behavioural and motivational consequences that slow the development of other cognitive skills and inhibit performances on many academic tasks. In short, as reading develops, other cognitive processes linked to it track the level of reading skill. Knowledge bases that are in reciprocal relationships with reading are also inhibited from further development. The longer this developmental sequence is allowed to continue, the more generalized the deficits will become, seeping into more and more areas of cognition and behaviour. (Stanovich, 1986)
It is clear that the habit of wide and extensive reading equips students to excel academically. Reading is a simple and affordable preventative of, and solution to, any number of academic challenges students face. It is especially important during the summer months when students who are not engaged in learning activities experience the phenomenon of 'summer learning loss'. The takeaway from this review of reading benefits can only be that students must be encouraged and supported to READ, READ, READ!
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