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Benefits of Literacy and Children - What Some Studies Show

by Maggie Lyons

Those who read a lot will enhance their verbal intelligence; that is, reading will make them smarter.
Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich, “What Reading Does for the Mind”

That statement won’t come as a surprise to many, but the widely shared belief in the power of reading is not just a matter of personal opinion. When it comes to literacy among children, there is solid scientific evidence that the more children read, especially independently—that is, outside school—the more likely they are to do well in other subjects at school and in their adult lives. From a study they conducted in the 1990s (see “What Reading Does for the Mind” in American Educator, Spring/Summer 1998), Professors Cunningham and Stanovich found that children’s vocabulary, spelling, verbal fluency, and general knowledge were significantly influenced by the amount of time they spent reading, and this is considered a conservative conclusion.

According to Cunningham and Stanovich, a child who reads—outside school—for 21.1 minutes per day (1,823,000 words per year) learns more than 200 times more words than a child who only reads—again, outside school—one minute per day (8,000 words per year). Conversation doesn’t come close to expanding vocabulary as reading does. When children become habitual readers, they are much more likely to enjoy opportunities as adults that may occur more slowly or not at all for children who don’t read much. The benefits of reading can be enjoyed not just by smart or more skilled readers but by children with limited reading and comprehension skills.

The benefits listed above are considered to be conservative. Many others have been listed in numerous academic and nonacademic sources. In the ongoing British Every Child a Reader project, which stimulates reading among school children, teachers have reported that students who improved in reading comprehension also improved in motivation, behavior, work habits, and emotional health and wellbeing. The more proficient readers enjoyed learning. Their “oral language skills, ability to following directions, work habits, social interaction with adults and classmates and self-confidence all improved.” One teacher reported that the increased effort her students made with reading changed “their whole outlook … from being a negative ‘I can’t’ to a very positive ‘I will have a go.’” Students in this study even acquired “long-term aspirations for an economically successful future.”

Elizabeth Pretorius, lecturer at the University of South Africa, believes what we “can’t read will hurt” us because most of our knowledge is contained in printed literature. So “we must read to access it … successful learning relies on the ability to read.” Reading develops our ability to decode characters, in other words, our ability to make sense of information on the written page. This skill is especially necessary in our technological age when we now have access to massive amounts of text via the Internet.
Research into the benefits of reading, especially reading in childhood, is still in its infancy, but everything I have read so far confirms the widely held belief that it is important to encourage children to become avid readers, and the earlier the better.

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Maggie Lyons is a children’s author and freelance editor. After a career of business and educational writing and editing, she has discovered the magic of writing fiction and nonfiction for children.

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