thesis the importance of reading

• Importance Of Reading Essay

Importance of Reading Essay

500+ words essay on reading.

Reading is a key to learning. It’s a skill that everyone should develop in their life. The ability to read enables us to discover new facts and opens the door to a new world of ideas, stories and opportunities. We can gather ample information and use it in the right direction to perform various tasks in our life. The habit of reading also increases our knowledge and makes us more intellectual and sensible. With the help of this essay on the Importance of Reading, we will help you know the benefits of reading and its various advantages in our life. Students must go through this essay in detail, as it will help them to create their own essay based on this topic.

Importance of Reading

Reading is one of the best hobbies that one can have. It’s fun to read different types of books. By reading the books, we get to know the people of different areas around the world, different cultures, traditions and much more. There is so much to explore by reading different books. They are the abundance of knowledge and are best friends of human beings. We get to know about every field and area by reading books related to it. There are various types of books available in the market, such as science and technology books, fictitious books, cultural books, historical events and wars related books etc. Also, there are many magazines and novels which people can read anytime and anywhere while travelling to utilise their time effectively.

Benefits of Reading for Students

Reading plays an important role in academics and has an impactful influence on learning. Researchers have highlighted the value of developing reading skills and the benefits of reading to children at an early age. Children who cannot read well at the end of primary school are less likely to succeed in secondary school and, in adulthood, are likely to earn less than their peers. Therefore, the focus is given to encouraging students to develop reading habits.

Reading is an indispensable skill. It is fundamentally interrelated to the process of education and to students achieving educational success. Reading helps students to learn how to use language to make sense of words. It improves their vocabulary, information-processing skills and comprehension. Discussions generated by reading in the classroom can be used to encourage students to construct meanings and connect ideas and experiences across texts. They can use their knowledge to clear their doubts and understand the topic in a better way. The development of good reading habits and skills improves students’ ability to write.

In today’s world of the modern age and digital era, people can easily access resources online for reading. The online books and availability of ebooks in the form of pdf have made reading much easier. So, everyone should build this habit of reading and devote at least 30 minutes daily. If someone is a beginner, then they can start reading the books based on the area of their interest. By doing so, they will gradually build up a habit of reading and start enjoying it.

Frequently Asked Questions on the Importance of Reading Essay

What is the importance of reading.

1. Improves general knowledge 2. Expands attention span/vocabulary 3. Helps in focusing better 4. Enhances language proficiency

What is the power of reading?

1. Develop inference 2. Improves comprehension skills 3. Cohesive learning 4. Broadens knowledge of various topics

How can reading change a student’s life?

1. Empathy towards others 2. Acquisition of qualities like kindness, courtesy

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Counselling

Think of yourself as a member of a jury, listening to a lawyer who is presenting an opening argument. You'll want to know very soon whether the lawyer believes the accused to be guilty or not guilty, and how the lawyer plans to convince you. Readers of academic essays are like jury members: before they have read too far, they want to know what the essay argues as well as how the writer plans to make the argument. After reading your thesis statement, the reader should think, "This essay is going to try to convince me of something. I'm not convinced yet, but I'm interested to see how I might be."

An effective thesis cannot be answered with a simple "yes" or "no." A thesis is not a topic; nor is it a fact; nor is it an opinion. "Reasons for the fall of communism" is a topic. "Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe" is a fact known by educated people. "The fall of communism is the best thing that ever happened in Europe" is an opinion. (Superlatives like "the best" almost always lead to trouble. It's impossible to weigh every "thing" that ever happened in Europe. And what about the fall of Hitler? Couldn't that be "the best thing"?)

A good thesis has two parts. It should tell what you plan to argue, and it should "telegraph" how you plan to argue—that is, what particular support for your claim is going where in your essay.

Steps in Constructing a Thesis

First, analyze your primary sources.  Look for tension, interest, ambiguity, controversy, and/or complication. Does the author contradict himself or herself? Is a point made and later reversed? What are the deeper implications of the author's argument? Figuring out the why to one or more of these questions, or to related questions, will put you on the path to developing a working thesis. (Without the why, you probably have only come up with an observation—that there are, for instance, many different metaphors in such-and-such a poem—which is not a thesis.)

Once you have a working thesis, write it down.  There is nothing as frustrating as hitting on a great idea for a thesis, then forgetting it when you lose concentration. And by writing down your thesis you will be forced to think of it clearly, logically, and concisely. You probably will not be able to write out a final-draft version of your thesis the first time you try, but you'll get yourself on the right track by writing down what you have.

Keep your thesis prominent in your introduction.  A good, standard place for your thesis statement is at the end of an introductory paragraph, especially in shorter (5-15 page) essays. Readers are used to finding theses there, so they automatically pay more attention when they read the last sentence of your introduction. Although this is not required in all academic essays, it is a good rule of thumb.

Anticipate the counterarguments.  Once you have a working thesis, you should think about what might be said against it. This will help you to refine your thesis, and it will also make you think of the arguments that you'll need to refute later on in your essay. (Every argument has a counterargument. If yours doesn't, then it's not an argument—it may be a fact, or an opinion, but it is not an argument.)

This statement is on its way to being a thesis. However, it is too easy to imagine possible counterarguments. For example, a political observer might believe that Dukakis lost because he suffered from a "soft-on-crime" image. If you complicate your thesis by anticipating the counterargument, you'll strengthen your argument, as shown in the sentence below.

Some Caveats and Some Examples

A thesis is never a question.  Readers of academic essays expect to have questions discussed, explored, or even answered. A question ("Why did communism collapse in Eastern Europe?") is not an argument, and without an argument, a thesis is dead in the water.

A thesis is never a list.  "For political, economic, social and cultural reasons, communism collapsed in Eastern Europe" does a good job of "telegraphing" the reader what to expect in the essay—a section about political reasons, a section about economic reasons, a section about social reasons, and a section about cultural reasons. However, political, economic, social and cultural reasons are pretty much the only possible reasons why communism could collapse. This sentence lacks tension and doesn't advance an argument. Everyone knows that politics, economics, and culture are important.

A thesis should never be vague, combative or confrontational.  An ineffective thesis would be, "Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe because communism is evil." This is hard to argue (evil from whose perspective? what does evil mean?) and it is likely to mark you as moralistic and judgmental rather than rational and thorough. It also may spark a defensive reaction from readers sympathetic to communism. If readers strongly disagree with you right off the bat, they may stop reading.

An effective thesis has a definable, arguable claim.  "While cultural forces contributed to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the disintegration of economies played the key role in driving its decline" is an effective thesis sentence that "telegraphs," so that the reader expects the essay to have a section about cultural forces and another about the disintegration of economies. This thesis makes a definite, arguable claim: that the disintegration of economies played a more important role than cultural forces in defeating communism in Eastern Europe. The reader would react to this statement by thinking, "Perhaps what the author says is true, but I am not convinced. I want to read further to see how the author argues this claim."

A thesis should be as clear and specific as possible.  Avoid overused, general terms and abstractions. For example, "Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe because of the ruling elite's inability to address the economic concerns of the people" is more powerful than "Communism collapsed due to societal discontent."

Copyright 1999, Maxine Rodburg and The Tutors of the Writing Center at Harvard University

Tips for Online Students , Tips for Students

Why is Reading Important for Your Growth?

Updated: November 22, 2022

Published: September 8, 2019

Want to escape without traveling anywhere? Looking to learn about a specific subject? Interested in knowing what it was like to live in the past? Reading can provide all of this and more for you! For anyone who wonders, “why is reading important?” we’re here to share the many reasons.

Yet, there are also some people who read because they are told they must for school. If you fit into that last categorization, then it may be useful to understand the many benefits of reading, which we will uncover here. We’ll also share why people read and what makes it so important.

Now all you have to do is….keep reading!

The Many Benefits of Reading

Beyond reading, because you have to, the importance of reading cannot go unnoticed. Reading is of great value because it provides the means by which you get to:

Strengthens Brain Activity

Reading gets your mind working across different areas. For starters, it involves comprehension to process the words you read. Beyond that, you can use your analytical abilities, stimulate memories, and even broaden your imagination by reading words off a page.

Reading is a neurobiological process that works out your brain muscles. As you do so, you can help to slow down cognitive decline and even decrease the rate at which memory fades. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have even found that reading reduces the level of beta-amyloid, which is a protein in the brain that is connected to Alzheimer’s. Who knew that reading could have physical, psychological, and spiritual benefits?

Boosts communication skills

Both reading and writing work to improve one’s communication skills. That’s why if you’re looking to become a better writer, many of the suggestions that you come across will include reading more. Reading can open your eyes, literally and figuratively, to new words. Try this next time you read: if you come across any words you read that you don’t know, take a moment to look them up and write them down. Then, remember to use your new words in your speech so you don’t forget them!

Helps Self-Exploration

Books can be both an escape and an adventure. When you are reading, you have the opportunity to think about things in new ways, learn about cultures, events, and people you may have never otherwise heard of, and can adopt methods of thinking that help to reshape or enhance your identity. For example, you might read a mystery novel and learn that you have a knack and interest in solving cases and paying attention to clues.

Makes One Intellectually Sound

When you read a lot, you undoubtedly learn a lot. The more you read, you can make it to the level of being considered “well-read.” This tends to mean that you know a little (or a lot) about a lot. Having a diverse set of knowledge will make you a more engaging conversationalist and can empower you to speak to more people from different backgrounds and experiences because you can connect based on shared information. Some people may argue that “ignorance is bliss,” but the truth is “knowledge is power.” And, the more you read, the more you get to know! That’s why you can bet that any educational degree you choose to obtain will involve some forms of reading (yes, even math and computer science) .

It’s no wonder why you may see people reading by the pool, on the beach, or even on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Reading is a form of entertainment that can take you to fictional worlds or past points in time.

Imparts Good Values

Reading can teach values. Whether you read from a religious text or secular text, you can learn and teach the difference between right and wrong and explore various cultural perspectives and ways of life.

Enhances creativity

Reading has the potential to boost your levels of creativity. Whether you read about a specific craft or skill to boost it or you are reading randomly for fun, the words could spark new ideas or images in your mind. You may also start to find connections between seemingly disparate things, which can make for even more creative outputs and expressions.

Lowers Stress

If you don’t think that strengthening your brain is enough of a benefit, there’s even more good news. Reading has also been proven to lower stress as it increases relaxation. When the brain is fully focused on a single task, like reading, the reader gets to benefit from meditative qualities that reduce stress levels. 

A Look at the Most Popular Books

As we celebrate World Book Day, take a look at some of the most popular books of all time. These should give you an idea of what book to pick up next time you’re at a library, in a bookstore, or ordering your next read online.

• The Harry Potter Series
• The Little Prince
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
• The Da Vinci Code 
• The Alchemist 

The Gift of Reading

Whether you had to work hard to learn to read or it came naturally, reading can be considered both a gift and a privilege. In fact, we can even bet that you read something every single day ( this blog, for instance), even if it’s not a book. From text messages to signs, emails to business documents, and everything in between, it’s hard to escape the need to read.

Reading opens up doors to new worlds, provides entertainment, boosts the imagination, and has positive neurological and psychological benefits. So, if anyone ever asks or you stop to think, “why is reading important” you’re now well-read on the subject to provide a detailed response and share your own purpose of reading!

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Why Reading Is Important for Children’s Brain Development

Early childhood is a critical period for brain development , which is important for boosting cognition and mental well-being. Good brain health at this age is directly linked to better mental heath, cognition, and educational attainment in adolescence and adulthood. It can also provide resilience in times of stress.

But, sadly, brain development can be hampered by poverty. Studies have shown that early childhood poverty is a risk factor for lower educational attainment. It is also associated with differences in brain structure, poorer cognition, behavioral problems, and mental health symptoms.

This shows just how important it is to give all children an equal chance in life. But until sufficient measures are taken to reduce inequality and improve outcomes, our new study, published in Psychological Medicine , shows one low-cost activity that may at least counteract some of the negative effects of poverty on the brain: reading for pleasure.

Wealth and brain health

Higher family income in childhood tends to be associated with higher scores on assessments of language, working memory, and the processing of social and emotional cues. Research has shown that the brain’s outer layer, called the cortex, has a larger surface area and is thicker in people with higher socioeconomic status than in poorer people.

Being wealthy has also been linked with having more grey matter (tissue in the outer layers of the brain) in the frontal and temporal regions (situated just behind the ears) of the brain. And we know that these areas support the development of cognitive skills.

The association between wealth and cognition is greatest in the most economically disadvantaged families . Among children from lower-income families, small differences in income are associated with relatively large differences in surface area. Among children from higher-income families, similar income increments are associated with smaller differences in surface area.

Importantly, the results from one study found that when mothers with low socioeconomic status were given monthly cash gifts, their children’s brain health improved . On average, they developed more changeable brains (plasticity) and better adaptation to their environment. They also found it easier to subsequently develop cognitive skills.

Our socioeconomic status will even influence our decision making . A report from the London School of Economics found that poverty seems to shift people’s focus toward meeting immediate needs and threats. They become more focused on the present with little space for future plans—and also tended to be more averse to taking risks.

It also showed that children from low-socioeconomic-background families seem to have poorer stress coping mechanisms and feel less self-confident.

But what are the reasons for these effects of poverty on the brain and academic achievement? Ultimately, more research is needed to fully understand why poverty affects the brain in this way. There are many contributing factors that will interact. These include poor nutrition and stress on the family caused by financial problems. A lack of safe spaces and good facilities to play and exercise in, as well as limited access to computers and other educational support systems, could also play a role.

Reading for pleasure

There has been much interest of late in leveling up. So what measures can we put in place to counteract the negative effects of poverty that could be applicable globally?

Our observational study shows a dramatic and positive link between a fun and simple activity—reading for pleasure in early childhood—and better cognition, mental health, and educational attainment in adolescence.

We analyzed the data from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) project, a U.S. national cohort study with more than 10,000 participants across different ethnicities and and varying socioeconomic status. The dataset contained measures of young adolescents ages nine to 13 and how many years they had spent reading for pleasure during their early childhood. It also included data on their cognitive health, mental health, and brain health.

About half of the group of adolescents started reading early in childhood, whereas the others, approximately half, had never read in early childhood, or had begun reading later on.

Meet the Greater Good Toolkit for Kids

28 practices, scientifically proven to nurture kindness, compassion, and generosity in young minds

We discovered that reading for pleasure in early childhood was linked with better scores on comprehensive cognition assessments and better educational attainment in young adolescence. It was also associated with fewer mental health problems and less time spent on electronic devices.

Our results showed that reading for pleasure in early childhood can be beneficial regardless of socioeconomic status. It may also be helpful regardless of the children’s initial intelligence level. That’s because the effect didn’t depend on how many years of education the children’s parents had had—which is our best measure for very young children’s intelligence (IQ is partially heritable).

We also discovered that children who read for pleasure had larger cortical surface areas in several brain regions that are significantly related to cognition and mental health (including the frontal areas). Importantly, this was the case regardless of socioeconomic status. The result therefore suggests that reading for pleasure in early childhood may be an effective intervention to counteract the negative effects of poverty on the brain.

While our current data was obtained from families across the United States, future analyses will include investigations with data from other countries—including developing countries, when comparable data become available.

So how could reading boost cognition exactly? It is already known that language learning, including through reading and discussing books, is a key factor in healthy brain development. It is also a critical building block for other forms of cognition, including executive functions (such as memory, planning, and self-control) and social intelligence.

Because there are many different reasons why poverty may negatively affect brain development, we need a comprehensive and holistic approach to improving outcomes. While reading for pleasure is unlikely, on its own, to fully address the challenging effects of poverty on the brain, it provides a simple method for improving children’s development and attainment.

Our findings also have important implications for parents, educators, and policymakers in facilitating reading for pleasure in young children. It could, for example, help counteract some of the negative effects on young children’s cognitive development of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

About the Authors

Barbara jacquelyn sahakian.

Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, Ph.D. , is a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge.

Christelle Langley

Christelle Langley, Ph.D. , is a postdoctoral research associate in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge.

Jianfeng Feng

Jianfeng Feng, Ph.D. , is a professor of science and technology for brain-inspired intelligence/computer science at Fudan University.

Yun-Jun Sun

Yun-Jun Sun, Ph.D. , is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence at Fudan University.

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The Science of Reading and Its Educational Implications

Mark s. seidenberg.

Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Research in cognitive science and neuroscience has made enormous progress toward understanding skilled reading, the acquisition of reading skill, the brain bases of reading, the causes of developmental reading impairments and how such impairments can be treated. My question is: if the science is so good, why do so many people read so poorly? I mainly focus on the United States, which fares poorly on cross-national comparisons of literacy, with about 25-30% of the population exhibiting literacy skills that are low by standard metrics. I consider three possible contributing factors, all of which turn on issues concerning the relationships between written and spoken language. They are: the fact that English has a deep alphabetic orthography; how reading is taught; and the impact of linguistic variability as manifested in the Black-White “achievement gap”. I conclude that there are opportunities to increase literacy levels by making better use of what we have learned about reading and language, but also institutional obstacles and understudied issues for which more evidence is badly needed.

Is there an area in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience that has been more successful than the study of reading? Let's not underestimate the amount that has been learned. We, the community of scientists who study reading (including my colleagues Perfetti and Treiman, whose own research is described in accompanying articles) understand the basic mechanisms that support skilled reading, how reading skill is acquired, and the proximal causes of reading impairments.

We understand the fundamental problem facing the beginning reader: how to relate a new code, a written script, to an existing code, spoken language. We know which behaviors of 4 year old pre-readers are strong predictors of later reading ability, how children make the transition from pre-reader to reader, and the obstacles that many encounter. We know what distinguishes good and poor readers, younger and older skilled readers, “typical” readers from those who are atypical because of either constitutional factors (such as a hearing or learning impairment) or environmental ones (for example, poor schooling or poverty).

We know how basic skills that provide the child's entry into reading relate to other types of knowledge and capacities that support comprehending texts of increasing variety and difficulty. We understand that some aspects of reading are universal (because people's brains are essentially alike) and that some are not (because of differences among writing systems and the languages they represent).

Neuroimaging studies have been successful in identifying the main brain circuits involved in reading and the anomalous ways they develop in dyslexics, and several probable causes of such impairments. We have computational models that specify the mechanisms that underlie basic reading skills, how children acquire them, and how differences in experience (with spoken language and reading) and individual differences (in learning and memory capacities, motivation and other factors) result in varied reading outcomes. This vast research base has led to the development of intervention and remediation methods that can reliably help many children who need it. Researchers disagree about many details—it's science, not the Ten Commandments—but there is remarkable consensus about the basic theory of how reading works and the causes of reading successes and failures (for reviews, see Rayner et al., 2001; Pennington, 2006 ; Morris et al., 2010; Gabrieli, 2009 ; Pugh et al., 2012 ).

My question, then, is this: if the science is so advanced, why do so many people read so poorly? In America not long ago we had a “Sputnik moment,” occasioned by the release of the results of the 2009 round of the PISA cross-national assessments of the academic performance of 15 year olds (OECD PISA, 2009). As in previous years, US performance was close to the average for the 34 OECD countries. However, this round was the first to include data from Shanghai and Singapore, which along with Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan, scored higher than the US. These findings received far more attention than the fact that for many years the US has scored lower than countries such as Canada, Australia, Finland and New Zealand on the PISA exercise. The president, the secretary of education, and the commentariat (e.g., Finn, 2009) all treated the results as evidence of a crisis in American education that called for immediate action. But 2010 was not 1957 and so the second “Sputnik moment” passed quickly, rapidly dropping out of public discourse ( Fig. 1 ).

Number of times the phrase “sputnik moment” was uttered on CNN, an American cable news network over a two year period. The Larege spike followed the release of results from the 2009 PISA assessment and coincided with President Obama's 2011 State of the Union address.

Although the PISA results made the news, there is plenty of in-house data about the literacy problem in the US, posted on the Department of Education's web site ( http://ies.ed.gov ). The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (2003) found that about 93 million adults read at “basic” or “below basic” levels. At these levels, a person might be able to find the listing for a television program on cable TV, but not understand the instructions and warnings that come with their blood pressure medication ( Lesgold & Welch-Ross, 2012 ). Results on the NAEP (“the nation's report card”) document the origins of low literacy in the performance of 4 th and 8 th graders ( http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard ). Like everything else about education in the US, this assessment exercise has been the focus of controversy, with different stakeholders spinning the data in different ways. People who emphasize how well American education is doing point to the finding that since 1992, when the modern form of the NAEP was introduced, between 59-67% of 4 th graders and 69-76% of 8 th graders scored at the “basic” level or higher. People who think we should be doing better—I am in this camp—can point to the fact that 66-71% of 4 th graders and 66-71% of 8 th graders scored at “basic” or “below basic” levels. Put another way, there are far too many children scoring in the lowest tier (about a third of the 4 th graders and a quarter of the 8 th graders are “below basic”), and far too few in the highest (6-8% of the 4 th graders and a mere 3% of the 8 th graders are “advanced” readers by this measure). The American polity is in a test-happy phase and so there is much other data about who can read and how well than can be reviewed here. It is fair to say that assessments of adults and children consistently indicate that large numbers of individuals in the US read poorly, and that this has been true for many years.

Low literacy's consequences for the affected individuals and for society are vast, as we all know. It creates serious challenges to fully participating in the workforce, managing your own health care, and advancing your children's education. Looking at these facts, and knowing something about how reading works, I've asked myself whether our science has anything to contribute to improving literacy outcomes in this country and others. It might not. Literacy failure could be due to factors well outside the boundaries of this science: poverty, for example. Poverty has many sequelae, including higher infant mortality rate, atypical brain development, shorter life span, worse health and health care, higher crime and incarceration rates, lower educational achievement, higher dropout rates, poorer schools with less experienced teachers and toward the bottom of a list that could go on much longer, poor reading ( General Accounting Office, 2007 ). Surely reducing poverty would have a bigger impact on literacy than anything inspired by our research. Any person with a politically-acceptable plan to substantially reduce or eliminate poverty should step forward immediately.

If poverty were all that mattered, this article could end here. However, the relationship between socioeconomic status and reading achievement is not simple. It is difficult to isolate effects of SES (itself a complex construct; Duncan & Magnuson, 2005 ) from the many other factors with which it is correlated. Nonetheless, data from a variety of sources suggest that there is much about observed literacy outcomes that SES does not explain. I return to this issue in the final section of this article in the context of the Black-White “achievement gap”, where the confound between SES and achievement is of particular concern. Here I merely want to cite some representative findings suggesting that although poverty has enormous impact, it is not the whole story.

The PISA assessments provide a wealth of data (so to speak) about the relationship between national wealth and reading performance. The 2009 data set includes multiple measures related to a country's economic health for a core group of 34 OECD countries. The main findings are quite interesting. 1 In brief, two economic factors, the country's gross domestic product (GDP) and amount spent on education, are only weakly related to reading performance. The proportion of socio-economically disadvantaged students in each country has a bigger impact, with higher proportions associated with lower scores. However, the US does not score poorly because lower income students are overrepresented; in fact, the US clusters with many OECD countries on this measure, and reading scores in this group vary widely. It is also of interest that parents' education level is a much stronger predictor than economic indicators across countries. Of course, it takes more complex analyses to identify relations among such factors and their relative contributions. Nonetheless, even these descriptive data indicate that both SES and other factors are important determinants of outcomes.

The NAEP assessment also includes information regarding the moderating effects of a variety of factors, including race/ethnicity, gender, and eligibility for subsidized or free school lunch, a common (though rough) proxy for SES. 2 Again there are strong indications that both SES and other factors affect outcomes. There is a large, consistent effect of SES as indexed by the subsidized lunch proxy in every year of testing. However, there are similar results for other factors, such as gender. Females have scored significantly higher than males in every year of NAEP testing. Females also scored significantly higher than males in every participating country/municipality in the 2009 PISA assessment. (The US had one of the smaller gender gaps, whereas Finland, a perennial high-scoring country, had one of the largest.) The gender differences within and across countries may be related in some complex manner to SES, but the consistency of the effect across countries with widely varying economic profiles suggests that SES is not the main determinant.

Insofar as the US does not seem likely to substantially reduce or eliminate poverty any time soon and SES is not the only factor affecting reading outcomes, this article will not end here. To restate the question: what are the main causes of reading failures in the US (and perhaps other countries where similar conditions exist) and does reading science have anything to contribute to substantially reducing them, the considerable impact of poverty notwithstanding? I'll consider this question by examining three quite different kinds of factors often thought to be relevant to literacy outcomes in the US.

Blame English?

One possibility is that a certain number of people are doomed to fail to learn to read well because of intrinsic properties of English. The child's initial task is to learn how the written code relates to the spoken language they already know. The writing system is alphabetic, and we tell beginning readers that letters correspond to sounds, but then we teach them early reading vocabulary that includes HAVE, GIVE, SAID, SOME, WAS, WERE, IS, ME, ONE, WHO, SCHOOL, and many other words with atypical spelling-sound correspondences. These inconsistencies are a much commented-upon property of English. Other alphabetic writing systems are indeed more consistent at this level of analysis, many of them conforming (to a very high degree but not perfectly) to the principle that each symbol in the writing system (a “grapheme” consisting of one or more letters) correspond to a single unit (a phoneme) in the spoken language. English is said to be a “deep” orthography, whereas Italian, German, Russian, Finnish, Korean, Serbo-Croatian, and many other alphabets are “shallow” ( Katz & Frost, 1992 ). Written English is obviously a workable system but the learning curve is steep and a greater proportion of individuals may be left behind than if the writing system were shallow.

This hypothesis is contradicted by the consistently high reading achievement in countries such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore where English is also the main language of instruction (Quebec exception duly noted). Although these results suggest that written English is not the whole problem, perhaps performance would be even higher in these countries (and the US) if it were not so peculiar. These cross-national findings are correlational of course. What is needed is more direct evidence as to whether it is easier to learn to read in shallow alphabetic orthographies, holding other factors aside to the extent possible.

Researchers in many countries have attempted to address this question. By now it is quite clear that it is easier to learn to read words and nonwords aloud in shallow alphabetic orthographies compared to English (for reviews, see Aro & Wimmer, 2003 , and several chapters in Snowling & Hulme, 2005, and in Joshi & Aaron, 2006). The advantage for shallow orthographies has been observed in Italian, Spanish, German, French, Finnish, Serbian, Turkish and other languages. “Learning to read in Albanian” is “A skill easily acquired” according to Hoxhallari et al. (2004) because the alphabet is so shallow. Children know the full set of spelling-sound correspondences for Finnish, which has a shallow orthography, by the time formal schooling commences (at age 7 following a compulsory year of preschool). 3 Tested on their skill at reading words and nonwords aloud, children in Wales learning to read in Welsh (which has a shallow alphabetic script) outperform children from the same area who are learning to read in English ( Hanley et al., 2004 ). The Welsh studies permitted comparisons that excluded many potentially confounding socioeconomic and cultural factors. Such studies suggest in short, that shallow is easier. Share (2008) argues that theories of reading have been led astray because of overreliance on studies of English, an “outlier” among writing systems. Perhaps there would be higher literacy achievement in the US if the writing system were more like Finnish or Albanian.

I don't think so. For one thing, this comparative research on reading acquisition makes the mistake of equating the task of reading words and nonwords aloud with “reading” (as in Aro & Wimmer, 2004, Spencer & Hanley, 2003, and many other studies). Children are sometimes called upon to read aloud, in classrooms and in experiments; reading aloud provides overt evidence about the child's knowledge of words and the opportunity to provide explicit feedback (e.g., corrections of mispronunciations). Because of the nature of the writing system, the child's ability to name words and nonwords aloud in English is a major step in reading acquisition. The task has also provided a domain in which to explore statistical learning procedures (Harm & Seidenberg, 1999) that are relevant to language acquisition, visual cognition, and much else. The goal of reading, however, is comprehension. Reading aloud is much more strongly related to comprehension in English than in shallow orthographies (see, e.g., Lindgren, deRenzi, & Richman, 1985 ). In shallow orthographies, reading aloud can be achieved without comprehending what is being said, indeed without knowing the language. I know this to be true because I proved it at my Bar Mitzvah. Modern Hebrew can be written with or without vowels. With the vowels included, the writing system is shallow: words have simple and consistent spelling-sound correspondences, which can be learned rapidly, comprehension not required. Fortuitously, Hebrew is a good “Bar Mitzvah language” ( Seidenberg, 2011 ), as are Finnish, Albanian, Welsh, Italian and other shallow alphabetic orthographies.

One would not want to confuse barking at print with reading comprehension, however. Phil Gough would not have. According to his “simple view of reading” ( Hoover & Gough, 1990 ), children's reading comprehension is a function of decoding skills (recognizing letters, relating print to sound) and knowledge of spoken language (vocabulary and grammar). These skills are dissociable. If the writing system is sufficiently shallow, a person can learn to read aloud without comprehension (my Hebrew). Conversely, a person can know a spoken language quite well without being able to read it (as is true of most 5 year olds who speak English). Among clinicians and researchers, there is a move to reserve the term “dyslexia” for a developmental reading impairment that interferes with acquiring basic print-related skills, especially ability to relate print to sound, independent of spoken language comprehension ( Snowling & Hulme, 2011 ). Other children acquire adequate decoding skills but comprehend texts poorly; these children are also “poor readers,” but a different diagnostic category is needed because their poor reading comprehension is secondary to deficiencies in spoken language.

Granted that it is easy to learn to decode in shallow orthographies, does this confer a comprehension advantage as well? Few studies have closely examined reading aloud, reading comprehension, and spoken language abilities in the same children, although there are some interesting leads. The studies of children learning to read in Welsh and English yielded an interesting tradeoff: whereas the Welsh children performed much better at reading common words and simple nonwords aloud, the English children scored higher when tested on comprehension. As Hanley et al. (2004) noted, “This result suggests that a transparent orthography does not confer any advantages as far as reading comprehension is concerned. As comprehension is clearly the goal of reading, this finding is potentially reassuring for teachers of English” (p. 1408). Why the English children exhibited better comprehension with poorer reading aloud cannot be determined with certainty from these studies. The comparison between Welsh-learning and English-learning children is not entirely clean because the sociolinguistic context is such that English is the dominant language. The Welsh-learning children therefore have substantial knowledge of English (and are bilingual to some degree), whereas the English-learning children have much less knowledge of Welsh and are essentially monolingual. What is clear is that ability to read aloud may say little about the child's reading comprehension.

Durgunoğlu (2006) reached a similar conclusion from extensive studies of reading in Turkish. Turkish has a shallow orthography and a complex, highly productive agglutinating morphology. Summarizing, she noted that “Phonological awareness and decoding develop rapidly in both young and adult readers of Turkish because of the transparent orthography and the special characteristics of phonology and morphology. However, reading comprehension is still a problem.” (2006, p. 226). In her experiments, children's comprehension lagged substantially behind their ability to pronounce words aloud, which she attributes to properties of the spoken language, specifically that complex morphological system, which takes native speakers many years to learn. Whereas comprehension develops more rapidly than production in learning a first language, shallow orthographies create the opposite effect: production—reading aloud—can advance more rapidly than comprehension.

Even within English, accuracy in reading aloud and reading comprehension frequently decouple. Skilled readers are able to read and comprehend many words they mispronounce. Here are some I collected from students and colleagues—words they did not know how to pronounce or systematically mispronounced for many years:

All true. A graduate student who spent a portion of his youth immersed in the computer game Chaos: The Battle of Wizards didn't realize until much later that it was connected to the spoken form /ke i -αs/. The two pronunciations of URANUS seem to be in free variation in the US. People can be more adept at engaging in coitus than pronouncing it. A personal example: the Seidenberg and McClelland (1989) model learned to pronounce QUAY as /kwe i / because the training lexicon was created by hand and that is how I thought it was pronounced (it was corrected in later models). As a land-locked kid growing up on the south side of Chicago, I knew the word from reading but not speech. These cases show that a person can know the meaning of a written word but lack secure knowledge of the pronunciation. People frequently generate erroneous pronunciations that they would not have heard in spoken language. If words like these were used in a reading-aloud experiment, even adult, highly skilled readers of English would perform more poorly than Welsh or Turkish subjects.

Nation and Cocksey (2009) found that 7 year old English-speaking children often know the meanings of words they incorrectly read aloud. Familiarity with the spoken form of a word (as indexed by auditory lexical decision performance) was related to accuracy in reading it aloud, especially for words with irregular spelling-sound correspondences. Across subjects, 521 words were read aloud incorrectly; the correct definition was provided for 328 of them (63%). Of course the fact that ability to comprehend and pronounce words can dissociate should have been obvious from the mere existence of severely hearing impaired deaf individuals who do not receive oral training, do not know the pronunciations of words, but are nonetheless good readers. (The fact that it difficult to become a skilled reader under these conditions is an important but separate issue; Goldin-Meadow & Mayberry, 2001 ).

In summary, reading aloud is not a good index of reading comprehension or a basis for evaluating “ease of learning to read” different writing systems. We should therefore be skeptical of claims that it is easy to learn to read in shallow orthographies, and of the corollary belief that English is especially difficult. Over the past 20 years or so, researchers in many countries have correctly recognized the importance of obtaining data about reading in languages other than English, but attempted to correct the imbalance by replicating studies that had been conducted in English using reading aloud, a task that is more closely related to comprehension in that language precisely because of orthographic idiosyncrasies they were trying to surmount.

The relationship between writing systems and spoken languages

The orthographic depth hypothesis is an example of a very interesting idea that drew attention to an important issue (differences in how writing systems represent phonology and their potential impact on reading) and stimulated an enormous amount of research but turned out to be wrong. The hypothesis narrowly focused on the computation of phonology from print. Given the dependence of reading on spoken language, it seemed to follow that writing systems for which it was easier to compute phonology, the shallow ones, would also be easier to comprehend, other factors being equal. This prediction did not turn out to be correct because other factors are manifestly unequal. Looking across languages and writing systems, it can be seen that the properties of writing systems are related to properties of the languages they represent, in particular the complexity of the language's inflectional morphology. Inflectional morphology is an especially important component of language because it is an interface system conveying information about words and the syntactic structures in which they participate, and a major source of typological variation. Languages such as Welsh and Turkish have shallow writing systems but they are morphologically complex, marking properties such as case, number and gender. English and the Sinitic languages (Mandarin, Taiwanese, Cantonese, et al.) exhibit the opposite pattern: the writing systems are deep but their inflectional systems are simple. Looking at English, Gough had observed that early reading comprehension is a function of knowledge of print and knowledge of spoken language. With a cross-linguistic perspective it becomes clear that the two components are not independent. What has to be learned about print depends on properties of the writing system, which bear a non-arbitrary relationship to spoken language typology.

I have attempted to unify these broad cross-linguistic tendencies under the concept of “grapholinguistic equilibrium” ( Seidenberg, 2011 ). The writing systems that have survived support comprehension about equally well. A writing system's capacity to support comprehension can be thought of as a constant that is maintained via trade-offs between orthographic complexity (“depth”, number and complexity of symbols, etc.) and spoken language complexity (particularly morphosyntactic). For languages such as Welsh or Turkish, the spelling-sound correspondences are easily learned, but the morphology is not. These conditions allow children to accurately read aloud sentences that they would not be able to produce or fully comprehend given their still-developing knowledge of the spoken language. Written English is deep but the inflectional system is trivial and little impediment to comprehension. Under these conditions, children easily produce and comprehend sentences that they cannot accurately read aloud.

A deep orthography would be highly dysfunctional, possibly unlearnable, in languages with complex morphosyntax. To illustrate consider Serbo-Croatian. Classic studies focused on its highly consistent spelling-sound correspondences, so different from those in English ( Katz & Frost, 1992 ). My colleagues and I have been more interested in its inflectional system ( Mirković et al., 2004 , 2011 ), which is also very different from English. The system is unquestionably complex. Both nouns and verbs are inflected and there are inflections for number, gender, case, and tense. The inflections are not independent: Number on nouns, for example, depends on case and gender. The inflections are not discrete beads on a string, either: the system is fusional, such that a single suffix encodes multiple inflections. Then there is an additional wrinkle: the realization of an inflection depends on phonological properties of the root to which it is attached ( Table 1 ). The base form SAVETNIK (masculine, “advisor”) is zero-inflected. The final consonant K [/k/] is not retained throughout the inflectional paradigm, changing to C [/ts/] and Č [/tʃ/]. The inflection –E is used for both the vocative singular and the accusative plural; in the former, it is preceded by Č, in the latter by K. It is clear even from this sliver of the language that there is a lot to learn.

Note: All forms are masculine gender. K = /k/ as in Kevin, Č = /t?/ as in “church,” C = /ts/ as in “pizza.”

Now imagine trying to read this language in a script that is more like English, with single letters that represent multiple vowels (e.g., DOSE, LOSE, POSE). Then toss in a few random consonants with multiple pronunciations, such as C (as in CAP and CENT), G (GOAT, GIN), and Y (YOUNG, EDGY). The complexity of the inflectional system is already high. Adding ambiguity in the pronunciations of written letters would increase it enormously. The proper form of an inflection depends on the pronunciation of the previous consonant, but now the pronunciation of the letter representing that consonant will sometimes also depend on context (as with the ambiguous English letters). There would be further penalties if mastery of a complex morphological system requires formal instruction that itself involves reading.

It would take quantitative analyses or simulation models to determine the effects of additional orthographic indeterminacy and establish when the system would become intractable for human learners. The historical fact that languages with complex morphological systems have shallow orthographies is itself suggestive of pressures to maintain this equilibrium, however. Indeed, many times the alignment of language and writing system has been achieved with active intervention, as with the Armenian alphabet in the fifth century, Hangul in 15th century Korea, and Serbo-Croatian in the 19 th century (see Daniels & Bright, 1996 ).

In summary, there is no free orthographic lunch. The child does gain entry into reading more quickly if the associations between units in the written and spoken languages are simple and consistent. However, learning to read aloud in shallow writing systems is a bit like learning to play the violin in the Suzuki method. Both allow the child to rapidly begin performing with relatively little instruction. A four year old's performance of the “Twinkle Variations” may well be the musical equivalent of barking at print. Being able to pronounce words aloud is a helpful skill to possess if your task is to learn a complex, quasiregular morphological system over a many-year period that extends into formal schooling. But, there is little evidence that precocious knowledge of spelling-sound correspondences confers a comprehension advantage, or that the irregularities in written English present an especial burden. 4

What About How Reading is Taught?

American educators have never been able to settle on how to teach children to read. The issue has been debated since Horace Mann was head of the Massachusetts Board of Education in the 1840s. Mann described letters as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” and encouraged teaching children to read whole words at a time—a lesson that “would be like an excursion to the fields of Elysium” compared to other practices. Mann's tone—authoritative assertion coupled with contempt for other views—is characteristic of much of the subsequent 150 years of debate. 5

How much of the literacy problem in America is due to the way reading has been taught? Everyone knows about the “reading wars” of the past 30 years–the debate over “phonics” and “whole language” approaches. The 2000s saw the emergence of a compromise called “Balanced Literacy,” said to incorporate the best aspects of the two approaches. “Balanced literacy” is a Treaty of Versailles solution that allowed educators to declare the increasingly troublesome “wars” over without having seriously addressed the underlying causes of the strife. The issues are complex, controversial, and ongoing. Here I want to briefly examine some basic considerations, from the perspective of a scientist who studies how reading works, which suggest that how reading is taught is indeed a significant part of the literacy problem in the US and other countries. There are three main points: (a) Contemporary reading science has had very little impact on educational practice mainly because of a two-cultures problem separating science and education; (b) This disconnection has been harmful. Current practices rest on outdated assumptions about reading and development that make learning to read harder than it needs to be, a sure way to leave many children behind; (c) Connecting the science to educational practice would be beneficial but is extremely difficult to achieve. The current environment limits the amount of collaborative work at the all-important translational interface. In the US, the conflicting and often strongly entrenched interests of various stakeholders—educators, politicians, scientists, taxpayers, labor organizations, parent groups—make it hard to achieve meaningful change within the existing institutional structure of public education.

My comments about the culture of education (by which I mean beliefs and attitudes about how children learn and the functions of schooling, particularly with respect to reading) may seem harsh to readers who are not close to the issues. Many people will naturally assume that although scientists and educators may have different views, both have much to contribute and the path to greater progress is through cooperation. Every academic is aware of the importance of interdisciplinary work and of the challenges involved in communicating across disciplines. We also know that the successful creation of cross-disciplinary bridges can have transformative effects, sometimes leading to the emergence of new fields that are much more than the sum of the disciplinary parts. Such a transformation is needed in education and I hope it can be achieved. The question is how. It may be hard for people who are unfamiliar with the landscape to appreciate just how difficult the challenges are. As someone who has been immersed in these issues for many years I have struggled with finding ways to have a positive impact, and that is reflected in the material that follows (see also Seidenberg, 2012).

You may believe, as I usually do, that the collegial and politically-astute approach is to assume that well-intentioned individuals can transcend their differences in the service of a shared goal. Disciplinary barriers only exist as long as we allow them to. We can all do better jobs communicating what we do and what we've learned. Bridges are built on a foundation of mutual respect for individuals and diverse viewpoints. People are doing the best they can; neither side knows everything. I fully support creative bridge-building and have engaged in it myself, but I have come to question whether good intentions and greater effort can be any more effective going forward than they have been in the past. These positive and sincere impulses might have a better chance of succeeding if there were better understanding of the deep differences between the cultures of science and education, which are manifested in their discordant approaches to reading (see also Seidenberg, forthcoming ).

It is important to note that there is plenty of good science relevant being conducted within schools of education, often in departments such as Educational Psychology; however, it is isolated from programs focused on professional training and the development of curricula and instructional practices. My comments on the culture of education focus on the training-and-practices side. I should also stress that my concerns are not about teachers, but rather about what teachers are taught (about child development in general and reading in particular) and about how curricula and instructional practices are created and evaluated. I am not challenging anyone's integrity, commitment, motivation, effort, sincerity, or intelligence. But I am challenging some deeply-held beliefs that have guided educational policies and practices for many years. I would expect this to be discomfiting for many people, but also recognizable as relevant to their deep commitments to helping students learn.

Finally, I must acknowledge that my treatment of these issues is incomplete, given this article's length limitations. Below I mainly characterize the current situation rather than how it arose. The resistance to the reading science of the recent past also needs to be considered in a historical context, which includes earlier attempts to base educational practices on the science of the moment. It also needs to be considered in light of other challenges to educators' traditional control over educational policies and practices (including federal intervention via legislation such as No Child Left Behind, and powerful new educational philanthropies; Ravitch, 2011 ). I provide this broader context in Seidenberg (forthcoming) .

The Two Cultures of Science and Education

Learning to read is an educational issue, historically the purview of educators, specifically schools of education. The history of education in the US has been extensively documented, mainly from the perspective of educators themselves (e.g., Ravitch, 2000 ; Cremin, 1988 ). Popping up a level, one sees that science and education occupy different territory in the intellectual world (literally so on many university campuses). The result is that people who are studying the same thing—how children learn to read, for example—can nonetheless have little contact. The cultures of education and science are radically different: they have different goals and values, ways of training new practitioners, criteria for evaluating progress. The two cultures also communicate their research at separate conferences sponsored by parallel professional organizations attended by different audiences, and publish their work in different journals. There are publishers that target one audience and not the other. These cross-cultural differences, like many others, are difficult to bridge.

Psychologists have been studying reading since the 19 th century and educators have had an approach-avoidance conflict about it ever since. Education as a discipline embraced a few theorists with roots in modern psychology—Dewey, Vygotsky, Piaget, and Bruner among others—whose work underlies the deeply entrenched “constructivist” approach in education ( Tobias & Duffy, 2009 ). There is deep skepticism about the relevance of empirical studies that utilize the tools of modern experimental cognitive and developmental psychology, whether in laboratories or classroom settings (e.g., Coles, 2000 ); however, it co-exists with a readiness to appropriate findings that are consistent with existing beliefs and practices. The special role of science—to find out, to the best of our ability, what is true, letting the implications fall where they may—is subverted if people selectively attend to the findings they find congenial: it transforms research studies into another form of anecdote. Educators also use our research as a source of novel findings that feed the relentless demand for educational innovation. Often this means getting far too carried away far too rapidly with findings that are interesting and new but also not solidly established or understood.

These conflicting attitudes about science and education are at the heart of controversies about reading instruction. What I'll call the Modern Synthesis about learning to read, reading skill, and the relationship between reading and language emerged from work conducted since the 1970s, beginning with Gibson and Levin (1978) , Liberman et al. (1977) , Gough (e.g., Gough & Hillinger, 1980 ; Hoover & Gough, 1990 ), Stanovich (1980) , and others. Almost all of this research was conducted by scientists working outside traditional departments and schools of education. The empirical findings underlying the Modern Synthesis were summarized in several white papers commissioned by various agencies ( Adams, 1990 ; Snow et al., 1998 ; National Reading Panel, 2000 ; Snow, 2002 ; Lonigan & Shanahan, 2009 ). This research called into question basic assumptions underlying how reading is taught and what teachers are taught about reading and development—most importantly the idea that the way that children acquire a first, spoken language provides a good model for learning to read—and yet it has had little subsequent impact on them. The conflicts between scientific and educational approaches to reading continue, centered on three issues.

1. Deciding what is true

One of the major cross-cultural differences concerns attitudes about evidence. There is a movement to encourage evidence-based practices in education, analogous to the ones in medicine and clinical psychology (see http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc ). The effort founders, however, if the stakeholders do not agree on what counts as evidence, or who should decide. Many educators are dismissive of attempts to examine reading from a scientific perspective, which is seen as sterile and reductive, intrinsically incapable of capturing the ineffable character of the learning moment, or the chemistry of a successful classroom ( Coles, 2000 ). Education as a discipline has placed much higher value on observation and hard-earned classroom experience. This division was apparent in reactions to the NRP report (2000) . The panel reviewed the scientific literature relevant to learning to read, having established explicit a priori criteria for what kinds of studies would be considered. Those criteria excluded studies that educators value: mainly, observational, quasi-ethnographic studies of individual schools, teachers, classrooms, and children that do not attempt to conform to basic principles of experimental design or data analysis (see, e.g., Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Rasinski et al., 2011 ). The report was therefore of little interest, to many educators except as evidence for a scientistic bias at odds with the educational establishment's core values ( Krashen, 2001 ). 6

From the perspective of modern studies of cognition, educators' confidence in the reliability of their own observations and experiences in classroom settings is baffling. If teachers really could figure out how reading works and children learn just by observation and experience, there wouldn't be a literacy problem or debates about best practices. But what we can learn about reading this way is limited. Most of what we do when we read is subconscious: we are aware of the result—whether we understood a text or not, whether we found the information we were seeking. Neither teachers nor scientists can directly observe children's mental and neural processes; what can be intuited about them based on classroom experience is limited, and intuitions often conflict. Introspection and systematic personal observation were the main methodologies used by the founders of modern psychology ( Boring, 1953 ), but discovery of their limitations led to the adoption of less observer-dependent methods. The limitations are even greater than the early psychologists could have known. What people observe depends on what they believe (see Cox et al., 2004 , for a striking illustration). Inferences based on observation are subject to deep-seated biases that required Nobel-prize caliber research to uncover ( Kahneman, 2011 ). The limitations of personal observation and experience are among the reasons why we conduct this other, scientific, kind of research: to understand components of reading that would otherwise be hidden from view and to do it in an objective, independently verifiable way. A folk psychology about how we read based on intuition and observation does not become any more reliable when elevated to educational principle, but that is the modern history of educational theorizing about reading.

2. The socio-cultural approach

The Modern Synthesis developed out of research that examined reading within the broader context of research on human language and cognition and their neural and computational bases. Within education, a much more influential approach has emphasized the socio-cultural aspects of literacy, particularly the status of reading in different cultural, linguistic, and socio-economic subgroups (e.g., Gee, 1997 ; Au, 1998 ; Scribner & Cole, 1981 ; Moje & Luke, 2009 ). The approach emphasizes attitudes toward reading within such groups; the varied purposes for which people read in different contexts defined by situation, culture, language, or SES; the relevance of different reading-related activities to learners in these contexts; and how socio-cultural factors affect a child's motivation to learn to read and which classroom practices will be successful.

Much of what is assumed within the socio-cultural approach seems true enough, at an informal level: reading isn't a unitary task; how we read depends on what we are reading and for what purpose; in developing a curriculum it would be wise to take into account the cultural and socio-economic context, including different attitudes toward reading and differences in experiences and opportunities outside the classroom that can greatly affect children's progress. These factors are likely to have a strong impact on the child's motivation to read, a very significant factor that reading scientists have largely ignored.

The socio-cultural research addresses important issues; they are deeply implicated in the “achievement gaps” discussed in the next section. The problem is that socio-cultural paradigm is positioned as an alternative to studies of the types of knowledge and processing mechanisms that underlie reading and how they are acquired, rather than addressing complementary issues. The tension between these approaches furnished the subtext for the “reading wars”. The heart of the conflict was a debate about the validity of what were termed “skills” vs. “literacy” approaches, which, amazingly, were seen as competing alternatives. 7 The scientists were seen as focused on “skills” (e.g., learning to read words and sentences accurately and fluently; vocabulary development), whereas educators emphasized developing “literacy” (the child's appreciation the various types and uses of written language, by individuals with diverse backgrounds, values and cultural traditions). Classroom time is a zero-sum game and so choices between skills and literacy had to be made. Moreover, teaching basic skills to beginning readers was thought to be counterproductive because it stifles children's natural curiosity about reading and their motivation to learn. This basic skills stuff may be necessary but it is also poisonous in large doses, so the child should be exposed to as little of it as possible. The traditional goal of teaching children to read has been replaced by coaching: encouraging the appreciation of and engagement in “multiple literacies.” Educational theorizing has gone “meta” about reading: there's little about how reading works (i.e., its neurocognitive bases), and much about how reading is used (various “literacy practices”) and by whom (various cultural/ethnic/language groups).

This conflict—which I am by no means overstating—arises from a failure to assume a genuinely developmental perspective. The act of reading and comprehending text involves the coordination of cognitive, linguistic, perceptual, motoric, memory and learning capacities. Understanding these capacities, how they develop, and how they are recruited in support of reading is obviously relevant to being able to help children become successful readers. What is relevant to teach (or “facilitate”) depends on where the child is on an extended developmental trajectory. The ability to read and comprehend words and their components is a basic, foundational skill. Helping children achieve this skill, without creating disinterest in reading, is the educational challenge. Acquisition of this foundation allows the child to benefit from other activities that promote further advancement: extended practice reading a variety of texts, with close checks on comprehension; reading texts for different purposes; gaining background knowledge relevant to what is being read. Socio-economic and cultural factors are highly relevant to the child's ability to benefit from schooling, but they do not change the nature of the reading process, or the kinds of knowledge and skills that need to be acquired.

3. Scientific literacy

The gap between the cultures ensures that people coming from the education side have little opportunity to gain an understanding of how research is conducted in relevant disciplines such as cognition, development, and neuroscience. Schools of education socialize prospective teachers into an ideology about children, learning, and reading. Prospective teachers are not exposed to other research that is relevant to their jobs, which is especially damaging given how difficult those jobs are. Educators are unprepared to engage this science in a serious way because they lack the tools to understand what is studied, how it is studied, what is found, what it means, and its relation to other kinds of research. This also leaves educators vulnerable to claims that are intuitively appealing but unproved, overhyped, or discredited. Educators embrace the importance of “critical thinking skills” and “background knowledge” in reading and learning, and so it is ironic when they are missing from discussions of research on reading and learning. I think that this deep ambivalence about the relevance of science to the educational mission explains seemingly contradictory features of educational culture such as the cherry-picking of selected findings, while at the same time discounting the relevance of basic research (e.g., Duke & Martin, 2011 ). I think it also explains why the single most influential educational theorist in America is Lev Vygotsky, who lived in the Soviet Union, wrote in Russian, died in 1934, and never saw an American classroom, or a television, computer, calculator, videogame or smartphone, yet educators are also looking to the latest findings from neuroscience for help (e.g., Willis, 2007 ). It is hard to know what Vygotsky, who founded the socio-cultural framework for education as an alternative to approaches based on psychology and biology, would have thought of this latest development.

Does It Matter?

The people who teach teachers and create curricula don't pay much attention to the science of reading, but is there reason to think that closer alignment of science and education would result in better outcomes? There have always been competing views about how reading should be taught, or, indeed, if it needs to be taught at all. People who have had vastly different educational experiences manage to become skilled readers. We know that teacher quality has a huge impact on educational outcomes (e.g., Hanushek & Rivkin, 2006 ) , but what about different ways of teaching reading?

It should matter. Reading is a learned skill, an “unnatural act” in Gough's memorable phrase. Some children find it easy to learn to read regardless of what happens in the classroom; many are well on their way by the onset of formal schooling. Other children will have difficulty learning to read regardless of what happens in the classroom because they are dyslexic: they have a developmental disorder that interferes with learning to read. Few teacher education programs provide any serious training related to developmental disorders such as dyslexia, how children at risk can be identified, and how such children can be helped. Whereas researchers are closing in on the neural and genetic bases of dyslexia ( Gabrieli, 2009 ), educational theorists are still debating whether dyslexia exists, and if it does, whether knowing that a child has the disorder should have any impact on classroom practices ( Elliott & Gibbs, 2008 ). Many of those children and adults who score poorly on national assessments are undoubtedly dyslexics whose condition has not been identified or addressed.

Between these extremes there is the great majority of children for whom how reading is taught matters a great deal. They are why we should care about what teachers are taught about reading. The main problem is that many of the basic assumptions about how children learn to read that have guided teacher education, classroom practices, and curriculum development have been contradicted by the basic research that lead to the Modern Synthesis. Beliefs about reading, learning, and development, reinforced over many years within the insular culture of schools of education, do not coincide with facts about reading, learning, and development uncovered using a variety of methods in laboratory and naturalistic settings. Rather than repeat details reviewed in sources I've already mentioned, let me try to capture the essence of the problem.

Everyone agrees that children have to acquire basic skills related to processing the visual code (letter recognition, learning about orthographic structure and the relationships between orthography and phonology, etc.), which provide a foundation for developing the ability to comprehend different kinds of texts for different purposes. Beyond this basic observation, there are two contradictory views.

Educators have assumed that basic skills are relatively easy to acquire, but comprehension is hard. Acquiring basic skills is mostly a matter of providing a literacy-rich environment with activities that engage and motivate the child. Learning to read was assumed to be like learning a spoken language. Children do not need to be explicitly instructed in how to read any more than they needed instruction in how to speak a first language. In practice—a Whole Language K-3 classroom—this meant de-emphasizing instruction related to acquiring basic skills. In the appropriate environment, full of “authentic” literature (rather than books written for the purpose of teaching reading), literacy activities focused on extended, “multisensory” engagement with a book (e.g., reading a book to the child, small groups of children reading the book aloud together, making a personal copy of the book, drawing pictures of the book, coloring the book, “writing” about the book using invented spelling, talking about the book, etc.), the child would discover the mechanics. Following John Dewey, discovering how reading works is assumed to have more value than being taught to read. The teacher's role is to promote literacy, not teach reading.

Comprehension, in contrast, was thought to be hard. The great fear was that children might develop basic skills and yet fail to comprehend texts. (Indeed it was thought that an initial focus on phonics would make it harder to become a good comprehender.) And so, inspired by theorists such as Frank Smith (1971 , now in its sixth edition), curricula focused on developing the child's explicit knowledge about text structure, types of inferences, the varied relationships between author and reader, the varied goals of reading, how to monitor comprehension and repair errors, and so on.

On the science side, the story is the exact opposite. Basic skills are difficult to acquire (mainly because of the partial and abstract way that writing systems represent spoken language) and thus the area where instruction matters most. Comprehension, in contrast, depends on extended experience using spoken and written language for varied purposes. Environments and activities that provide such experience can therefore promote comprehension skill. Ironically, this aspect of becoming a skilled reader more closely resembles spoken language acquisition than does the acquisition of basic skills.

Reading comprehension initially depends on the child's knowledge of spoken language. Learning a first language involves encoding detailed information about the statistical structure of the utterances to which the child is exposed ( Seidenberg, 1997 ). This information is continually updated through the lifespan, via language use ( Haskell, Thornton, & MacDonald, 2010 ). Comprehension abilities vary among children because there are huge individual differences with respect to the sheer amount of spoken language to which the child is exposed, and the range of vocabulary items and sentence structures it includes. Thus, reading comprehension can be improved by enriching the child's knowledge of spoken language ( Hoff, 2013 ).

Children who are given the instruction and support to acquire basic skills can advance to reading varied texts for varied purposes, learning from feedback about whether they are succeeding rather than explicit instruction in how to comprehend. Promoting skill development through engagement and feedback is different from teaching the child a meta-theory of comprehension. Eventually the relationship between spoken and written language becomes reciprocal and interactive. Knowledge of spoken language facilitates learning to read; the child can then acquire vocabulary and familiarity with diverse grammatical structures from reading as well as speech. What is learned from reading also contributes to the further development of spoken language skills. For skilled readers, the systems become closely knit, even at the neural level ( Pattamadilok et al., 2010 ).

In short, theorists on the education side had the instructional vs. experiential demands of acquiring basic skills vs. comprehension backward . Generations of teachers were then taught that the skills come naturally and that comprehension requires explicit instruction. That reversal has made learning to read harder for many children.

Finally, because of this two-cultures problem, there is very little opportunity to focus on how to best integrate basic research with educational practices. The science of reading is highly advanced but it does not come with prescriptions about educational practice attached. It is one thing to know about how children learn to read and another to translate that knowledge into classrooms. The NRP report again offers a good illustration of the zeitgeist. The report did a good job describing the main elements involved in learning to read, and the supporting evidence. It was not within the panel's mandate to address the educational issue, how these components could be affectively addressed within an integrated, multi-year reading curriculum. Thus the report described the importance of elements such as phonemic awareness and vocabulary in early reading, but not the levels of competence that are developmentally appropriate or how to assess them, or the effectiveness of different instructional methods. This created an enormous loophole. It is very easy to design curricula that can be said to conform to the recommendations of the NRP, simply by touching on all of the components they listed, even if only for a day. There has not been a serious dialogue about the pedagogical implications of the science summarized in the report, one of the major factors contributing to the science's lack of impact.

The Impact of Language Variation in the Educational Context

There cannot be a serious discussion of literacy issues in the US without considering the “achievement gap.” The term refers to disparities in academic performance between groups of individuals. It is mainly used with reference to minority groups – African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans – compared to whites, but there are many other “gaps.” There are huge “gaps” associated with income disparities ( Reardon, 2011 ), and there are gaps for other groups such as first generation children of immigrants to the US compared to later generation children. Such “gaps” are seen in reading, math, science and in other areas, and on a variety of indices, including grades, standardized test scores, the kind of classes students take, high school and college completion rates, and so on (Washington et al., in press). My focus is on the achievement gap in reading and, again, whether what we have learned from our research could be brought to bear on it. 8

I am also going to limit attention to the gap for African Americans, even though they exist for groups defined in many other ways. Why single out this group? First, because this gap is a major issue for a very large number of affected individuals. Second, because it is part of a long history of racial inequality in the US. Third, because it has been the focus of attention from politicians, educators, and economists for many years ( Jencks & Phillips, 1998 ; Equity and Excellence Commission, 2013 ). Fourth, because this gap has been persistent. It has existed for as long as relevant data have been collected, with little change despite government efforts dating from the War on Poverty through No Child Left Behind to Race to the Top. Fifth, it is an area in which I am conducting research (Washington et al., in press). Finally, the various achievement gaps in our society have varying causes. Conditions and circumstances that are highly relevant to one group may be moot for another. Although this focus is warranted it is also essential to recognize it as part of a much broader phenomenon affecting many diverse groups of people.

The causes of the achievement gap in reading for African Americans (and other groups) are obviously complex and cannot be covered fully here (see, e.g., Richardson, 2008 ; Magnuson & Duncan, 2006 ; Barton & Coley, 2009 ; Washington et al., in press). The topic is also a sensitive one, having to do with generalizations about groups, within which there is enormous variation. What is said here cannot be assumed to apply to all members of a group, or to any individual within the group. It can also be harmful to raise issues about group differences in contexts that do not permit serious exploration and exchange of ideas. 9 I also know from experience that anything that is said about this issue, however well-reasoned, backed by evidence, and carefully stated with necessary qualifications attached can be spun for political purposes that researchers cannot control. My goal here is limited: to establish the relevance of research on reading and language to understanding and potentially ameliorating this gap. My only personal agenda is to encourage others to conduct research in the area, for the same reasons I became involved: because the issues are scientifically interesting; because existing research on reading and language acquisition is relevant; because there is a research gap insofar as the factors and conditions specific to African American children's reading acquisition are understudied; because this gap could be addressed by researchers who study other aspects of language acquisition and reading; and because the consequences of reading failures are so devastating.

Econometric Analyses: What Is Missing from this Picture?

The basis of the Black-White achievement gap in reading has been extensively studied by econometricians and sociologists. Several important analyses have utilized a large publicly-available data set, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study ( http://nces.ed.gov/ecls ). These data were derived from extensive interviews with large numbers of individuals (about 20,000), supplemented with scores on assessment instruments. Consistent with other research, the ECLS data show that there is an achievement gap at the start of schooling: African American children are behind on measures of reading and pre-reading skills in kindergarten ( Duncan & Magnuson, 2005 ). Researchers have attempted to identify the bases of this gap by determining which factors in the data set account for the difference. Fryer and Levitt (2004) showed that six factors (out of over a hundred that were considered) accounted for the difference at the onset of schooling in this statistical sense: a composite measure of socioeconomic status, child's age at the start of kindergarten, birth weight, age of mother at time of first birth, whether the mother was a WIC (welfare) participant, and number of children's books in the home. These results are correlational, of course, and open to varied interpretation. This particular set of factors seems to be mainly tapping into SES and sequelae such as poorer health and health services, and fewer resources such as books in the home.

The results from additional waves of data collection yielded the surprising finding that the size of the gap increased through grade 3 ( Fryer & Levitt, 2006 ; see also Magnuson & Duncan, 2006 ). The causal interpretation is again unclear; schooling could either be exacerbating the gap, or the positive effects of schooling might be outpaced by the increasing impact of other factors. In either case, schooling was not acting as the “great equalizer”. 10 Moreover, the six factors that had accounted for the gap in kindergarten did not account for the gap in third grade, nor did any other factors in the data set. Fryer and Levitt wrote, “None of the explanations we examine[d], including systematic differences in school quality across races, convincingly explain the divergent trajectory of Black students.”

The fact that SES-related factors did not account for the increase in the gap is consistent with other findings indicating that the reading gap is not limited to lower income individuals. As noted above, performance on the NAEP is affected by SES, as indexed by the eligibility for subsidized lunch proxy. However, the black-white gap is highly consistent across the three levels of this measure (see Vanneman et al., 2009 , p. 33). Other studies have found that the gap exists for middle income blacks as well as low income ( Gosa & Alexander, 2007 ). Again it has to be emphasized that with overlapping distributions and imperfect correlations, there will be individuals who differ from these overall trends, including lower SES blacks whose reading achievement is on par with high-achieving, higher SES whites, a point that Magnuson and Duncun (2006 , p. 368) emphasized, noting that nearly a quarter of the black kindergarteners in the ECLS-K outscored the median for white students However, the group differences merit attention.

Here, then, is a puzzle. We are looking for a missing factor (or factors) with the following characteristics:

• It contributes to the increasing deficit from K-3.
• It affects individuals at different SES levels.
• It is not captured by the measures included in data sets like the ECLS.

What is it?

One possibility is: language. There are two elements to consider. One is knowledge of spoken language, which varies across children, like many other skills and capacities. The other is the nature of the linguistic codes to which children are exposed. I will focus on different dialects of English, although similar issues arise regarding exposure to different languages. I will consider each of these elements—language-general and dialect-related—in turn.

There is very little data about children's language in large-scale data sets such as the ECLS, the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development or the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 79 survey. 11 The ECLS-K survey studied by Fryer and Levitt includes an item about whether English is spoken in the home and a “cognitive assessment” consisting of items taken from a variety of standardized tests, but no direct assessments of the characteristics of a child's language and linguistic environment. Yet there is a substantial body of evidence about the impact of these factors on children's school achievement, particularly reading ( McCardle et al., 2001 ). Children vary considerably with respect to knowledge of components of spoken language, including vocabulary size, morphology, and syntax ( Bates et al., 1995 ). People often refer to differences in verbal “ability,” but the relative richness of children's language is affected by exogenous factors and so this term seems unsuitable. Some refer to spoken language “quality”, but in this context the term evokes the discredited idea that African American English is inherently inferior. Lacking a better term I will refer wherever possible to differences in general knowledge of spoken language. These differences could arise from constitutional, environmental, and socio-cultural factors.

The most widely studied such factor is SES. Differences in linguistic input associated with SES were documented in Risley and Hart's famous study (1995; see also Hansen & Joshi, 2010 ; Hoff, 2013 ). Children will have difficulty learning words, grammatical structures, and discourse conventions to which they are not exposed. Vocabulary in particular is strongly related to progress in learning to read ( NRP, 2000 ). In short, children's success in making the transition into reading depends heavily on their knowledge of spoken language, which varies across individuals and is associated with differences in SES ( Fernald & Marchman, 2011 ). African American children are overrepresented at the lower end of the SES distribution; therefore, they will be disproportionately subject to the effects of low SES on language.

This argument is inconclusive, however. The SES-related factors that Fryer and Levitt identified may be relevant, in part, because of their association with differences in language input, but this cannot be determined because the ECLS-K data set does not include measures of child or caregiver vocabulary (or other aspects of spoken language). The relations between their six factors and the child's knowledge of spoken language are indirect at best. Moreover, these factors accounted for differences at the onset of schooling, but not the growth in the gap through grade 3. Thus, whatever aspects of the linguistic environment they might be picking up are not sufficient to explain the increase. Finally, there is the fact that the achievement gap is not limited to the lower SES cohort. Disentangling the complex relationship between SES and the achievement gap continues to be the focus of research ( Duncan & Magnuson, 2012 ). A cautious reading of the existing literature suggests that there must be other factors involved and that the contributions of language variability need to be assessed more directly.

A further consideration not addressed by studies such as the ECLS is the nature of the linguistic code to which the child is exposed, in particular dialect. Dialects are variants of a language, spoken by individuals grouped by region, ethnicity, race, income, and other factors (Chambers & Trudgill, 1998). Every native speaker of a language learns a dialect of that language. English has many dialects, identifiable at different grain sizes (e.g., American vs. British English; regional dialects in these countries, etc.). In the US, one major division is between so-called “standard” or “mainstream” American English (SAE) and African American English (AAE). As in other countries, which dialect is treated as “standard” is not a linguistic issue but rather is determined by demographic, cultural and political considerations. AAE and SAE overlap—they are both versions of English—but also differ with respect to specific elements of phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax, and discourse/pragmatics ( Rickford, 1999 ). Although like others I will refer to AAE, it is important to recognize that it has regional variants, as does SAE ( Green, 2002 ; Wolfram & Schilling-Estes, 2006). Moreover, speakers vary in the extent to which they use characteristic features of AAE (a dimension termed dialect density; Thompson et al., 2004 ); thus the extent to which AAE differs from SAE also varies. AAE is used by most African Americans, at varying densities, across SES levels ( Washington, 1996 ). The question then is whether use of AAE contributes to the reading gap.

Research on this question extends back many decades (see Washington et al., in press, for more detailed review). One issue is whether an AAE speaker would be disadvantaged because the dialect is deficient in some manner. This issue was decisively resolved by the basic linguistic research on AAE conducted by Labov (1972) and subsequently many others ( Rickford et al., 2004 ). This research appropriately situated AAE in the context of dialectal variation as it occurs in languages around the world. One of the great achievements of this research was to establish how unexceptional AAE is as an example of linguistic variation (Chambers & Trudgill, 1998). Whether dialect use affects school achievement is not a question about the linguistic status of AAE. The unresolved question is whether use of the minority dialect has an impact because of the conditions surrounding its use. Specifically, AAE usage could affect the child's ability to benefit from educational experiences because of sociological and cultural factors (e.g., AAE is a “low status” dialect; books are written in SAE; acquiring skill in SAE is an educational goal in American schools). It is because of these conditions that differences between the dialects are relevant, not because they are linguistically significant.

Labov's research stimulated considerable research on the possible impact of AAE on the development of African American children's reading skills. Most of the early studies found that dialect usage had little effect on comprehension (Washington et al., in press). Thus it was concluded that what mattered was the quality of linguistic experience, independent of dialect.

These studies were thought to have put the issue of AAE's impact on reading acquisition to rest, but they did so prematurely in my view. The early studies do not hold up well by modern research standards and the strong conclusions that were based on them need to be re-examined. In recent years, researchers have begun to reopen the issue, using what has been learned about reading, language, development, and cognition over the past several decades to generate more specific hypotheses that can be tested using more powerful research methods. The topic is still understudied and many empirical questions are unresolved.

One major question is this: if language variation is a major element in the achievement gap, to what extent does it involve language-general vs. dialect-related aspects of language? Early reading achievement is closely related to knowledge of spoken language. This relationship is general, applying across languages and, within a language, across dialectal variants. Whether young children differ with respect to skills such as phonological awareness, the ability to analyze spoken words at the phonemic level, vocabulary size, and spoken language comprehension should matter, not which variant of a language they happen to speak ( Terry, in press ; Terry & Scarborough, 2010).

It is also possible that there could be dialect-related effects on reading outcomes. Such effects could arise from a variety of factors that emerge when linguistic differences between dialects converge with extralinguistic factors related to the educational and socio-cultural conditions under which dialects are used. The language-general and dialect-related possibilities are not mutually exclusive. They also may not be independent: for example, the acquisition of a language-general skill could be affected by dialect-related factors. General and dialect-related influences may also be difficult to differentiate because a child's general language ability is manifested in the use of a particular dialect. Finally, there may be advantages to exposure to multiple dialects, analogous to those associated with exposure to different languages ( Bialystok et al., 2009 ), although this possibility is rarely considered.

These issues can be illustrated with respect to vocabulary knowledge, a factor that has been the focus of much research and is known to have a major impact on reading acquisition. It is a fact about languages that they consist of inventories of words (among other elements). Vocabulary size, however, is a characteristic of a child—what he/she knows about this component of spoken language—not the dialect that is spoken. This observation suggests that research should focus on the child's knowledge of properties of spoken language, such as vocabulary, irrespective of dialect.

A potential complicating factor is that differences in language background—e.g., use of a minority dialect, varying exposure to and knowledge of the mainstream dialect, dialect usage in the school context—could affect the child's acquisition of “general” elements of spoken language. A factor such as vocabulary size needs to be considered not just as a quantitative predictor of reading outcomes, but also with respect to a theory of how this knowledge is acquired. It could then be determined whether or to what extent specific aspects of dialect experience matter. Is vocabulary acquisition affected by properties of a dialect, or the need to accommodate two dialects? Are such effects positive or negative or both? Do the effects differ depending on the child's point in development? Are they modulated by individual differences in cognitive capacities such as executive function? These issues are not well understood. The bilingual literature suggests they are worth addressing, however. Many studies have shown that preschool-aged bilingual children have smaller vocabularies in each language than comparable monolingual speakers ( Bialystok et al., 2005 ), which then has an impact on learning to read in one of the languages. These effects also arise from conditions relevant to children's learning rather than properties of the languages. They also occur across SES levels. The bilingual burden is by no means insuperable, but the developmental time course may be affected, creating another “gap”, but also the emergence of bilingual advantages ( Bialystok et al., 2009 ). Analogous issues may arise for AAE speaking children who are learning to read in SAE.

As an illustration, consider the optional deletion of final consonants in pronouncing some words in AAE. One consequence is that a given word (such as COLD) can be pronounced differently, at the phonemic level, in the two dialects. Deletion of final consonants also creates additional homophony: words such as COLD and COAL have different pronunciations (at the phonemic level) in SAE but they can be homophonic in AAE. Do these differences between the dialects have any impact on language learning or reading? Or are the differences inconsequential? I don't think we know. The existence of alternative pronunciations across dialects could create a more complex word learning problem, or it might be no more difficult than assimilating differences in pronunciation arising from pitch, speech rate, and so on. An increase in the number of homophones might facilitate vocabulary acquisition (fewer distinct phonological word forms to learn) or make it harder (because the child has to use other mechanisms to disambiguate homophones). Or the functional impact could be trivial. These unanswered questions suggest that it would be premature to treat vocabulary size as a general linguistic factor independent of dialect experience.

Given the limited evidence that is available, I believe that it would be a recapitulation of an earlier mistake to conclude at this point that dialect experience has no significant impact on reading or other aspects of school achievement. As Snow et al. (1991) noted, differences between home and school language could affect children's learning. For speakers of the mainstream dialect, the home and school dialects are the same. For speakers of the minority dialect AAE, the home and school dialects differ in varying degrees. Thus, dialect use is consistent across contexts for one group but not the other. AAE speakers have to learn about the mainstream dialect and use both dialects at the same time they are learning to read, write, and do arithmetic. SAE speakers do not have the additional language-related demands. Speakers of the minority dialect clearly have to do more work in order to succeed. They are nonetheless assessed against the same achievement milestones as SAE speakers. If this analysis is correct, it means that the achievement gap has been intractable because it is built in, guaranteed by prevailing circumstances unrelated to the linguistic validity of the dialect or the capacities of the child. 12 Stated another way, if by analogy to the Fryer and Levitt analysis the overhead associated with accommodating dialect differences were somehow factored out of the natural experiment, the gap in the first years of schooling would greatly narrow rather than grow.

Differences between dialects could potentially affect children's ability to benefit from classroom experience in numerous ways. For example, an SAE-speaking teacher will pronounce many words differently from the child and use different morphological and syntactic constructions. The additional processing and attentional demands associated with comprehending utterances in the less familiar dialect and switching between dialects could be expected to interfere with the child's opportunity to learn from what is being said. The impact would be exacerbated by the fact that the classroom context is a noisy one (literally, and in the information theoretic sense), degrading the quality of linguistic signals. The effect would be similar to imposing a delay on the on-line processing of spoken utterances. These demands could at the same time promote the development of other capacities such as executive function. There are opportunities for communication failures from the opposite side as well: a teacher who speaks SAE and does not know AAE may have more difficulty understanding the AAE speaking child. The teacher may also use discourse conventions (e.g., indirect speech acts) with which the child is unfamiliar, or misinterpret the child's own discourse conventions.

Then there are specific ways in which dialect differences could affect learning to read. The child speaks one dialect but books and other materials are written in the other dialect, again imposing additional learning and processing demands compared to the child for whom the same dialect is used for both. A useful comparison is to hearing-impaired children who are fluent, native signers of ASL, who have high verbal skills, with large vocabularies and language that exhibits a high degree of syntactic variety and complexity—who are nonetheless poor readers. There is an “achievement gap” in reading for the hearing-impaired, due in part to the fact that they are learning to read in English, a different language. There are important differences between these two situations (e.g., the ASL-English differences are greater than the differences between English dialects; the use of different dialects is not associated with presence or absence of a perceptual deficit such as hearing loss), but the analogy is apposite.

And what about acquiring basic reading skills? The beginning reader's initial challenge is to learn how the spoken language they know relates to the written code they are learning. Making this connection is difficult for many children, for reasons that have been investigated in great detail ( NRP, 2000 ). Reading an alphabet involves learning to treat spoken words as if they consist of discrete phonemes. Units in the written code (letters and digraphs) can then be mapped onto units in the spoken code (phonemes). Making this abstraction is difficult for many children. The task is further complicated by inconsistencies in the mappings between spelling and sound in English. The task becomes even more complex when a substantial number of words are pronounced differently at the phonemic level in the two dialects. Consider just the subset of words in AAE in which the final consonant can be dropped (e.g., GOLD→/goυl /, BEST→/bes/). A teacher explains that the word “gold” is spelled G-O-L-D. For an SAE speaking child this is a lesson about the alphabetic principle and the correspondences between four letters and four phonemes. What is being taught an AAE speaking child who pronounces the word /goυl/? That there are different ways to pronounce the word? That if the spelling maps onto one pronunciation, the final letter is pronounced /d/, whereas for the other it is silent? The alternative pronunciations create additional inconsistencies in the mappings between spelling and sound. The learning problem is further complicated by the fact that this deletion is not obligatory, and thus may be used for a given word only some of the time, or for only some words in a similarly spelled neighborhood (e.g., -OLD words).

In short, the need to accommodate both dialects may place a variety of additional burdens on young learners. The potential for dialect-related factors to affect learning—and the need to determine where differences between the dialects do and do not have a significant impact, positive or negative—does not invalidate the relevance of dialect-independent variability in spoken language skills. Plainly, both could exert influence, creating in the worst case a debilitating double-whammy. However, the extent to which such effects occur and how much impact they have are not well understood.

What is striking about dialect is how poorly it is addressed in America compared to other countries. Dialect variation is not specific to African Americans or English, but dialect differences seem to have greater prominence in this country than elsewhere. There are major dialect variants in countries such as Finland and Germany where literacy levels are higher than in the US. Although each situation is different in detail, the main challenges are the same. It appears that these countries do a better job of acknowledging and accommodating dialect differences. Are educators more familiar with dialect issues and their potential impact? Does teacher training include dialect-related issues? Is there less dialect-related prejudice in these countries? Is there greater exposure to alternative dialects prior to the onset of schooling? We know that what works in one country cannot simply be ported to another where relevant circumstances are different. Nonetheless, there is information to be gained from examining how such issues play out in other countries and languages. This effort might suggest ways of changing the culturally-determined conditions that contribute to the achievement gap.

Looking to the future, research on the achievement gap could take a page from research on reading and language disorders. Research on dyslexia, for example, has shifted from a focus on single causes (e.g., a visual or phonological deficit) to the view that outcomes arise from the aggregate effects of a set of risk factors ( Snowling & Hulme, 2011 ; Morris et al., 2010). Each factor is probabilistic in the sense that it does not itself guarantee a particular outcome. The factors also vary in degree of severity and relative impact. Together these factors yield a range of behavioral outcomes. The crucial linkage between the risk factors and outcomes is provided by theories of reading that specify major subskills and how they are learned. By analogy, the poor reading outcomes seen in the “achievement gap” arise from a variety of risk factors that are also probabilistic, vary in severity and impact, interact in complex ways, are differentially amenable to intervention, and yield a broad range of individual outcomes. Risk factors relevant to African American children in American schools include knowledge of spoken language (“general” language skills), language experience (e.g., dialect usage, exposure to and knowledge of the alternative dialect, the cognitive demands of dialect switching), adequacy of educational responses to language variation, and poverty, among others. There is a further need to link these risk factors to specific components of reading and how they are acquired.

Conclusions

Reading failures arise from multiple causes. My goal has been to suggest that this serious societal issue can further benefit from the kinds of research that we conduct as scientists who study reading and language. Reading is often viewed as secondary to spoken language and of very little linguistic interest. Reading did not evolve in the species, it is true, but once the technology became available to many people, it became as central an expression of our capacity for language as speech, greatly changing the ways that language can be used. There are scientists who study reading qua reading, and we have made considerable progress in understanding this skill. But questions about how reading works and the determinants of reading skill invariably come back to issues about spoken language. I've tried to suggest that our basic research is highly relevant to a societal problem of enormous importance. The challenges are daunting, and the need is great.

Acknowledgments

I am greatly indebted to Julie Washington, who stimulated my interest in dialect issues and the achievement gap, took me to school, and gave me the opportunity to become involved in research on the topic. She should not be held responsible for the contents of the article and especially any mistakes, but she has greatly influenced my thinking. I also thank Katherine Magnuson for guidance in navigating the socio-economic literature; she also provided very helpful feedback on a previous version, as did Heidi Feldman, Richard Aslin, and Maryellen MacDonald. I am grateful to Jon Willits for collecting the data in Figure 1 . Finally I thank the journal editor, Cindy Fisher, for her patience in dealing with a manuscript that was always almost finished. Preparation of this article was supported by NICHD grant R24D075454 (Julie Washington, Nicole Patton Terry, and Mark Seidenberg, PIs).

1 See the PISA summary document available here: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/pisa2009keyfindings.htm .

2 See, for example, the summary report for the 2011 reading assessment, available here: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2011/2012457.asp

3 Basic facts about Finnish elementary education are available here: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/46581035.pdf .

4 Is Hebrew the outlier writing system? Seemingly contrary to my analysis, it is morphologically complex but also orthographically deep in the default, unpointed form. Note, however that children learn to read using the shallow form in which vowels are indicated by diacritics ( niqqud ). Learning to read using the unpointed form would be vastly more difficult (though perhaps it was achieved by the ancient scribal elite prior to the development of the diacritic system).

5 The Mann quote (which I first encountered in Adams, 1990 ) is from an 1844 report he prepared as Secretary (head) of the Massachusetts Board of Education in which he was highly critical of the local schools, comparing them unfavorably to the classrooms he had observed in Prussia and Scotland (shades our modern-day envy of educational practices in Finland and Shanghai!). Greatly offended, schoolmasters from the Boston public schools published a rejoinder in which they remarked that “Our dissent from [Mann's] views arises from an honest conviction that, if adopted, they would retard the progress of sound learning.” Mann was advocating what later became known as the whole-word or “look and say” method, which involves memorizing words as patterns, without regard to the functions of the component letters. The Boston educators favored a “phonetic” teaching method. Their take-down of Mann's “new method” was thorough and incisive but settled nothing. The arguments on both sides will be easily recognizable to anyone familiar with the “Reading Wars” of the past 30 years. All the documents (the sides went back and forth a few times) are available as Ebooks on Google Play and highly recommended.

6 See Allington and Woodside-Jiron (1999) , who believe that many of the research findings that contradict their own views were the product of research funded by Reid Lyon, an official at NICHD, as part of an anti-education political agenda. The founding document for this political movement, they claim, is Grossen (1997) , an obscure 22 page review of 30 years of reading research funded by NICHD. Allington and Woodside-Jiron's paranoia is so keenly focused on NICHD that they ignore the mass of similar findings from research conducted in many other countries. The same conclusions about learning to read are found in both American reports such as the NRP (2000) and the British Rose Report ( Rose, 2006 ). It would be easier to dismiss Allington's campaign against reading science (see also Allington, 2002 ) were he not a leading figure in reading education, former president of the International Reading Association, former president of the National Reading Conference, and a member of the “Reading Hall of Fame”, http://www.readinghalloffame.org ).

7 In the current climate, everyone has to favor a “balanced” approach to reading instruction, acknowledging the importance of both skills and literacy. Having seen and comprehended the writing on the wall, organizations that had gone to the mat in support of “literacy” approaches such as Whole Language have turned out guidelines for “balanced literacy” instruction (see, e.g., Cowen, 2003 , for an example, and Moats, 2007 , for a critique of such efforts).

8 Basic data on achievement gaps in reading, as measured on the National Assessment of Academic Progress (NAEP), can be found in the Executive Summary of the 2011 results, pp. 15 and 44 ( http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2011/2012457.asp ).

9 As exemplified by then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers' conjectures about possible sex-linked genetic differences in mathematical aptitude ( http://www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2005/nber.php ). I believe that an article in a journal such as this one provides an appropriate context.

10 These data give the lie to a cherished belief. Then: “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of the conditions of men — the balance wheel of the social machinery.” Horace Mann, 1848 . And now: “In America, education is still the great equalizer.” Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, 2011 ( http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/remarks-us-secretary-education-arne-duncan-he-education-trust-conference ). We should also be considering whether education, as it occurs in American schools and as it is funded, exacerbates differences between groups.

11 NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, http://www.nichd.nih.gov/research/supported/Pages/seccyd.aspx ; Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 79 survey, http://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy79.htm .

12 I owe this observation to Julie Washington, who made the point with great clarity and impact. The finish line may be in the same location, but paths to getting there are not of equal length or difficulty.

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Tuesday-May-21-2024

Why Read? The importance of instilling a love of reading early.

Definitionally, literacy is the ability to “read, write, spell, listen, and speak.”

Carol Anne St. George, EdD, an associate professor and literacy expert at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education, wants kids to fall in love with reading .

“It helps grow their vocabulary and their understanding about the world,” she says. “The closeness of snuggling up with a favorite book leads to an increase in self-confidence and imagination, and helps children gain a wealth of knowledge from the books you share. And it only takes 15 minutes a day of reading together to nurture this growth.”

Reading is necessary for learning, so instilling a love of reading at an early age is the key that unlocks the door to lifelong learning. Reading aloud presents books as sources of pleasant, entertaining, and exciting formative experiences for children to remember. Children who value books are more motivated to read on their own and will likely continue to hold that value for the rest of their lives.

Instilling a love of reading early gives a child a head start on expanding their vocabulary and building independence and self-confidence. It helps children learn to make sense not only of the world around them but also people, building social-emotional skills and of course, imagination.

“Reading exposes us to other styles, other voices, other forms, and other genres of writing. Importantly, it exposes us to writing that’s better than our own and helps us to improve,” says author and writing teacher, Roz Morris. “Reading—the good and the bad—inspires you.”

Not only that, but reading is a critical foundation for developing logic and problem-solving skills. Cognitive development is “the construction of thought processes, including remembering, problem solving, and decision-making, from childhood through adolescence to adulthood” (HealthofChildren.com).

Why Focus on Summer?

Summer vacation makes up about one-quarter of the calendar year. This is a time when students face different opportunities based on the social and economic status of their families. An analysis of summer learning (Cooper, Nye, et al., 1996) found that “all students lost mathematics and reading knowledge over the summer…This evidence also indicated that losses were larger for low-income students, particularly in reading.” Summer reading has emerged as a key component of state legislation aimed at promoting student literacy.

The Horizons at Warner program is committed to maintaining and improving student literacy with our kids every summer they return. Nationwide, each affiliate of Horizons National administers reading assessments to students during the first and last weeks of program. Pre-assessment allows our teachers to customize the learning experience on a student-need basis, and post-assessment reinforces this by not only revealing student progress in each area, but by giving insight into how we can improve program design in the future.

Research demonstrates that if a child is not reading at grade level by third grade, their ability to meet future academic success and graduate on time is diminished. Teachers know that up to third grade children are learning to read. After third grade, students are reading to learn. According to St. George, it is impossible to be successful in science, social studies, and even mathematics without a strong foundation in reading and literacy.

On average, we see an improvement by 1 to 3 reading levels in our students here at Horizons at Warner. Keeping true to our mission, these levels will account for all and more of the percentage of summer learning loss that we know our students would face without this kind of academic intervention, and leave our students five to six months ahead of where they would have been without Horizons.

Reading TO children

According to Jim Trelease, author of the best-seller, The Read-Aloud Handbook: “Every time we read to a child, we’re sending a ‘pleasure’ message to the child’s brain… You could even call it a commercial, conditioning the child to associate books and print with pleasure” (ReadAloud.org)

Developing a connection between “pleasure” and reading is crucial. Learning is the minimum requirement for success in every field of life.

Thesis Statements

What this handout is about.

This handout describes what a thesis statement is, how thesis statements work in your writing, and how you can craft or refine one for your draft.

Introduction

Writing in college often takes the form of persuasion—convincing others that you have an interesting, logical point of view on the subject you are studying. Persuasion is a skill you practice regularly in your daily life. You persuade your roommate to clean up, your parents to let you borrow the car, your friend to vote for your favorite candidate or policy. In college, course assignments often ask you to make a persuasive case in writing. You are asked to convince your reader of your point of view. This form of persuasion, often called academic argument, follows a predictable pattern in writing. After a brief introduction of your topic, you state your point of view on the topic directly and often in one sentence. This sentence is the thesis statement, and it serves as a summary of the argument you’ll make in the rest of your paper.

What is a thesis statement?

A thesis statement:

• tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion.
• is a road map for the paper; in other words, it tells the reader what to expect from the rest of the paper.
• directly answers the question asked of you. A thesis is an interpretation of a question or subject, not the subject itself. The subject, or topic, of an essay might be World War II or Moby Dick; a thesis must then offer a way to understand the war or the novel.
• makes a claim that others might dispute.
• is usually a single sentence near the beginning of your paper (most often, at the end of the first paragraph) that presents your argument to the reader. The rest of the paper, the body of the essay, gathers and organizes evidence that will persuade the reader of the logic of your interpretation.

If your assignment asks you to take a position or develop a claim about a subject, you may need to convey that position or claim in a thesis statement near the beginning of your draft. The assignment may not explicitly state that you need a thesis statement because your instructor may assume you will include one. When in doubt, ask your instructor if the assignment requires a thesis statement. When an assignment asks you to analyze, to interpret, to compare and contrast, to demonstrate cause and effect, or to take a stand on an issue, it is likely that you are being asked to develop a thesis and to support it persuasively. (Check out our handout on understanding assignments for more information.)

How do I create a thesis?

A thesis is the result of a lengthy thinking process. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading an essay assignment. Before you develop an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize evidence, look for possible relationships between known facts (such as surprising contrasts or similarities), and think about the significance of these relationships. Once you do this thinking, you will probably have a “working thesis” that presents a basic or main idea and an argument that you think you can support with evidence. Both the argument and your thesis are likely to need adjustment along the way.

Writers use all kinds of techniques to stimulate their thinking and to help them clarify relationships or comprehend the broader significance of a topic and arrive at a thesis statement. For more ideas on how to get started, see our handout on brainstorming .

How do I know if my thesis is strong?

If there’s time, run it by your instructor or make an appointment at the Writing Center to get some feedback. Even if you do not have time to get advice elsewhere, you can do some thesis evaluation of your own. When reviewing your first draft and its working thesis, ask yourself the following :

• Do I answer the question? Re-reading the question prompt after constructing a working thesis can help you fix an argument that misses the focus of the question. If the prompt isn’t phrased as a question, try to rephrase it. For example, “Discuss the effect of X on Y” can be rephrased as “What is the effect of X on Y?”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? If your thesis simply states facts that no one would, or even could, disagree with, it’s possible that you are simply providing a summary, rather than making an argument.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? Thesis statements that are too vague often do not have a strong argument. If your thesis contains words like “good” or “successful,” see if you could be more specific: why is something “good”; what specifically makes something “successful”?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? If a reader’s first response is likely to  be “So what?” then you need to clarify, to forge a relationship, or to connect to a larger issue.
• Does my essay support my thesis specifically and without wandering? If your thesis and the body of your essay do not seem to go together, one of them has to change. It’s okay to change your working thesis to reflect things you have figured out in the course of writing your paper. Remember, always reassess and revise your writing as necessary.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? If a reader’s first response is “how?” or “why?” your thesis may be too open-ended and lack guidance for the reader. See what you can add to give the reader a better take on your position right from the beginning.

Suppose you are taking a course on contemporary communication, and the instructor hands out the following essay assignment: “Discuss the impact of social media on public awareness.” Looking back at your notes, you might start with this working thesis:

Social media impacts public awareness in both positive and negative ways.

You can use the questions above to help you revise this general statement into a stronger thesis.

• Do I answer the question? You can analyze this if you rephrase “discuss the impact” as “what is the impact?” This way, you can see that you’ve answered the question only very generally with the vague “positive and negative ways.”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not likely. Only people who maintain that social media has a solely positive or solely negative impact could disagree.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? No. What are the positive effects? What are the negative effects?
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? No. Why are they positive? How are they positive? What are their causes? Why are they negative? How are they negative? What are their causes?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? No. Why should anyone care about the positive and/or negative impact of social media?

After thinking about your answers to these questions, you decide to focus on the one impact you feel strongly about and have strong evidence for:

Because not every voice on social media is reliable, people have become much more critical consumers of information, and thus, more informed voters.

This version is a much stronger thesis! It answers the question, takes a specific position that others can challenge, and it gives a sense of why it matters.

Let’s try another. Suppose your literature professor hands out the following assignment in a class on the American novel: Write an analysis of some aspect of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn. “This will be easy,” you think. “I loved Huckleberry Finn!” You grab a pad of paper and write:

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel.

You begin to analyze your thesis:

• Do I answer the question? No. The prompt asks you to analyze some aspect of the novel. Your working thesis is a statement of general appreciation for the entire novel.

Think about aspects of the novel that are important to its structure or meaning—for example, the role of storytelling, the contrasting scenes between the shore and the river, or the relationships between adults and children. Now you write:

In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore.

• Do I answer the question? Yes!
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not really. This contrast is well-known and accepted.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? It’s getting there–you have highlighted an important aspect of the novel for investigation. However, it’s still not clear what your analysis will reveal.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? Not yet. Compare scenes from the book and see what you discover. Free write, make lists, jot down Huck’s actions and reactions and anything else that seems interesting.
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? What’s the point of this contrast? What does it signify?”

After examining the evidence and considering your own insights, you write:

Through its contrasting river and shore scenes, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn suggests that to find the true expression of American democratic ideals, one must leave “civilized” society and go back to nature.

This final thesis statement presents an interpretation of a literary work based on an analysis of its content. Of course, for the essay itself to be successful, you must now present evidence from the novel that will convince the reader of your interpretation.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.

Lunsford, Andrea A. 2015. The St. Martin’s Handbook , 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Ramage, John D., John C. Bean, and June Johnson. 2018. The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing , 8th ed. New York: Pearson.

Ruszkiewicz, John J., Christy Friend, Daniel Seward, and Maxine Hairston. 2010. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers , 9th ed. Boston: Pearson Education.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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📖Essay on Importance of Reading: Samples in 100, 150, and 250 Words

• Updated on  
• Apr 26, 2024

Language learning requires four skills i.e. Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing. It is an important part that eventually builds up the communication skills of a person. Reading will help in attaining knowledge of variable fields. It enhances the intellect of a person. Reading helps students to enhance their language fluency. Students must adopt the habit of reading good books. Reading books can also improve the writing skills. If you are a school student and searching for a good sample essay on the importance of reading then, you landed at the right place. Here in this blog, we have covered some sample essays on the importance of reading!

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay on the Importance of Reading in 100 Words
• 2 Essay on Importance of Reading 150 Words
• 3 Essay on Importance of Reading 250 Words
• 4 Short Essay on Importance of Reading

Essay on the Importance of Reading in 100 Words

The English language is considered the global language because it is the most widely spoken language worldwide. Reading is one of the important parts of acquiring complete knowledge of any language. Reading helps in maintaining a good vocabulary that is helpful for every field, whether in school, interviews , competitive exams , or jobs. 

Students must inculcate the habit of reading from a young age. Making a habit of reading good books will eventually convert into an addiction over time and you will surely explore a whole new world of information.

Being exposed to different topics through reading can help you look at the wider perspective of life. You will eventually discover a creative side of yours while developing the habit of reading.

Also Read: Essay on Gaganyaan

Essay on Importance of Reading 150 Words

Reading is considered an important aspect that contributes to the development of the overall personality of any person. If a person wants to do good at a professional level then he/she must practice reading.

There are various advantages of reading. It is not only a source of entertainment but also opens up the creative ability of any person. Reading helps in self-improvement, enhances communication skills, and reduces stress. It is one of the sources of pleasure and also enhances the analytical skills. 

Here are some of the best books to study that may help you enhance your reading skills:

• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling .
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee .
• The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri .
• Pride and Prejudice
• The Great Gatsby

A person with good reading skills would be able to communicate with more confidence and shine brighter at the professional level. Reading is a mental exercise, as it can provide you with the best experience because while reading fiction, or non-fiction you use your imagination without any restrictions thereby exploring a whole new world on your own. So, Just Enjoy Reading!

Also Read: Communication Skills to Succeed at Work

Essay on Importance of Reading 250 Words

Reading is a language skill necessary to present yourself in front of others because without being a good reader, it’s difficult to be a good communicator. Reading books should be practised regularly. Books are considered a human’s best friend.

It is right to say that knowledge can’t be stolen. Reading enhances the knowledge of a person. There are numerous benefits of reading.

I love reading books and one of my all-time favorite authors is William Shakespeare. His work “As You Like It” is my favourite book. By reading that book I came across many new words. It enabled me to add many words to my vocabulary that I can use in my life.

Apart from this, there are many other benefits of reading books such as reading can help you write in a certain way that can impress the reader. It also enhances communication skills and serves as a source of entertainment . 

Schools conduct various competitions which directly or indirectly involve reading. Some such competitions include debate, essay writing competitions, elocution, new reading in assembly, etc. All such activities require active reading because without reading a person might not be able to speak on a specific topic.

All such activities are conducted to polish the language skills of students from the very beginning so that they can do good at a professional level.

In conclusion, in a world of technological advancement, you are more likely to get easy access to online reading material available on the internet. So, you must not miss this opportunity and devote some time to reading different kinds of books. 

Also Read: SAT Reading Tips

Short Essay on Importance of Reading

Find a sample of a short essay on importance of reading below:

Also Read: Essay on Social Issues

Reading is a good habit; It helps to improve communication skills; Good books whether fiction or non-fiction widen your imagination skills; You can experience a whole new world while reading; It helps you establish your professional personality; Reading skills help you interact with other people at a personal and professional level; Improves vocabulary; Reading novels is considered a great source of entertainment; It helps you acquire excessive knowledge of different fields; Reading is motivational and a great mental exercise.

Reading is important to build the overall personality of a person. It establishes a sense of professionalism and improves the vocabulary. Adapting a habit of reading books will help in expanding your knowledge and creativity.

Here are some of the best books for students to read: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People; The Alchemist, The 5 AM Club, Rich Dad Poor Dad, etc.

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Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

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The Importance Of Reading

Reading is an exercise for the mind. It helps kids calm down and relax, opening doors of new knowledge to enlighten their minds. Kids who read grow up to have better cognitive skills. Reading is good for everyone, not only children or young adults. On the internet you will find many lists with up to 30 reasons why reading is important. Here I limit myself to 15 thoroughly substantiated reasons.

Reading improves vocabulary

Even as adults, when we read, we come across many new words we never really heard of. And we learn from this. As you read, you come across new words, phrases and writing styles. This is even more so for young people. Children sometimes stumble over their words, do not know how to pronounce them or what they mean. By reading, young people encounter new words more frequently and sometimes repetitively and therefore can see them better in their context. If you then pay attention to the pronunciation as a parent, these children will be better prepared for school.

Better comprehension

Kids who are encouraged to read at an early age have better comprehension of things around them. They develop smart thinking abilities and are more receptive to creativity and ideas that other kids their age lack. As a result, they grow up to be a good deal more intelligent and aware of their surroundings than kids who don’t read. The more you read, the more imaginative you become. Whenever you read a fiction book, it takes you another world. In the new world, your imagination works at its best as you try to see things in your own mind.

Develops critical thinking skills

One of the primary benefits of reading books is its ability to develop critical thinking skills. For example, reading a mystery novel sharpens your mind. What elements are there in a story to make this or that conclusion. Or if a book is non-fiction you will sometimes ask yourself if the author is right. Critical thinking skills are crucial when it comes to making important day to day decisions. Reading requires an individual to think and process information in a way that watching television can’t. The more you read, the deeper your understanding becomes about what you’re reading and its application.

Improves memory

Every time you read a book, you have to remember the setting of the book, the characters, their backgrounds, their history, their personalities, the sub-plots and so much more. As your brain learns to remember all this, your memory becomes better. What’s more, with every new memory you create, you create new pathways and this strengthens the existing ones.

Improves results at school

Kids who indulge in reading book and learning new things do better at school. They are more creative, open to new ideas, and develop empathy for others. For instance, kids who read about heroes idolize them, kids who love reading anatomy books dream of becoming a doctor, etc. They learn to empathize with characters in the books and want to be like them. Not only that, they learn valuable life lessons such as helping others and being kind. Moral codes such as goods things will be appreciated and evils punished take root in their minds too, as a result of which they learn to stay away from trouble.

Improves analytical skills

Figuring out how the story was going to end before finishing the book means you utilized your analytical skills. Reading allows your thinking skills to become more developed in the sense that you consider all aspects.

Builds confidence

In a world where competition in every walk of life prevails, we need to build a child’s personality as to have considerable confidence in themselves. Kids who lack confidence in their early stages often grow up to be shy, and at times suicidal, since they develop a victim mentality owing to the lack of confidence in their own self. They find it hard to face even the smallest of challenges life throws at them, instead simply giving up. Reading books sharpens many skills and all together they’ll build confidence.

Helps you socialize

We can always share whatever we have read with our family, friends and colleagues. All this increases our ability to socialize. Humans are social beings and in the world of smartphones, we are losing our ability to socialize. However, reading had led to the formation of book clubs and other forums where we get a chance to share and interact with others.

Broadens horizons

By reading books, you get a glimpse of other cultures and places. Books expand your horizons, letting you see other countries, other people and so many other things you have never seen or imagined. It’s the perfect way to visit a strange country in your mind. When we open a book while sitting in the comfort of our rooms, like time travelling, we transport our imaginations to a world purely based on the imaginations of the author. We learn about everything they wants u to know, see the world through their eyes and their perspective, learn about new people, discover their traditions, cultures and all that makes them unique and unforgettable.

Improves writing skills

Reading a well-written book affects your ability to become a better writer. Just like artists influence others, so do writers. Many successful authors gained their expertise by reading the works of others. Kids who learn to read also tend to develop better writing skills. The reason: they have been introduced to a world where words are their main weapon and they are free to shoot out. Literally! Parents must try to develop an interest for writing. Kids with good writing skills don’t fall victim to cramming and can express themselves more candidly through their words.

Improves focus and concentration

In our internet-crazed world, attention is drawn in a million different directions at once as we multi-task through every day. In a single 5-minute span, the average person will divide their time between working on a task, checking email, chatting with a couple of people (via gchat, skype, etc.), keeping an eye on twitter, monitoring their smartphone, and interacting with co-workers. This type of ADD-like behavior causes stress levels to rise, and lowers our productivity. When you read a book, all of your attention is focused on the story—the rest of the world just falls away, and you can immerse yourself in every fine detail you’re absorbing. Try reading for 15-20 minutes before work (i.e. on your morning commute, if you take public transit), and you’ll be surprised at how much more focused you are once you get to the office or school.

Makes you more empathetic

According to studies, losing yourself in books, especially fiction, might increase your empathy. In a study conducted in the Netherlands, researchers showed that people who were “emotionally transported” by a work of fiction experienced a boost in empathy. By reading a book, you become part of the story and feel the pain and other emotions of the characters. This in turn allows your mind to become more aware of how different things affect other people. Eventually, this improves your ability to emphasize with other people.

It develops emotions

When you read a book, you are on the receiving end of knowledge. The sender, the writer is delivering a message, imparting something of value, a fact, an opinion, a view or at the very least an emotion. They are inviting you into their own psyche and hoping that you will care enough to listen and respond to it. So it won’t be wrong to say that reading actually flexes emotions. It builds a connection between the reader and the writer you have never met or known before. Even if you disagree with what they are delivering, you get to know them, and you connect to them on an emotional level.

Readers are leaders

Although not definitively proved, but almost all great leaders were readers. One reason they are respected and known for their wisdom is because they develop a healthy reading habit. For centuries, reading has been the source of inspiration, growth and new ideas. It is a valuable investment in one’s own personality with uncountable and long-lasting benefits. If you want your child to become one, you need to encourage him to read. It will keep his mind healthy and productive. Only then they will be able to impact the world in a better way.

Learn at your own pace

Another benefit of reading a book is that you learn at your own pace. Since you have the book all the time, you can always go back to a section you feel you don’t understand. You can re-read a chapter as many times as you wish, without worry that you will miss out a section. If it’s a self-help book, you can tackle one issue at a time. Once you handle one problem, then you can move to the next issue whenever you feel you’re ready. Everything is done at your own pace and most importantly, your mind is free to interpret things the way you feel.

Reading books also reduces stress, helps you sleep better, improves health, develops your imagination and above all: it is just fun to do. Reading has a tremendous effect in fueling all aspects of our personality and enhancing our linguistic prowess. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the entirety of human life depends on it. Whatever we grow up to become in our lives, no matter where we stand, reading has somehow shaped it.

source listings: 23 Reasons Why You Need To Encourage Kids To Read by Serious Reading https://seriousreading.com/blog/1001-23-reasons-why-you-need-to-encourage-kids-to-read.html 30 Reasons to Read Books by Serious Reading https://seriousreading.com/blog/283-30-reasons-to-read-books.html 12 Reasons Why You Should Read More Books by Georgette Rivera https://www.theodysseyonline.com/12-reasons-should-read 10 Benefits of Reading: Why You Should Read Every Day by Lana Winter-Hébert https://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/10-benefits-reading-why-you-should-read-everyday.html

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Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens

• Authors condemn £4m library fund as a ‘sop’ and a ‘whitewash’

I t’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members’ interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I’m an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So I’m biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

And I’m here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

And it’s that change, and that act of reading that I’m here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What it’s good for.

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure.

It’s not one to one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King’s Carrie, saying if you liked those you’ll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King’s name is mentioned.)

And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

You’re also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it’s this:

The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

It’s simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

And while we’re on the subject, I’d like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it’s a bad thing. As if “escapist” fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn’t you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Another way to destroy a child’s love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children’s library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children’s’ library I began on the adult books.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.

I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories – they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.

In the last few years, we’ve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. That’s about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before – books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world. It’s a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.

Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.

According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the “only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account”.

Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens – have obligations. I thought I’d try and spell out some of these obligations here.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.

We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it’s the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers’ throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.

We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we ‘ve lessened our own future and diminished theirs.

We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I’m going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It’s this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we’ve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” he said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

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How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’?

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In one sense, the national conversation about what it will take to make sure all children become strong readers has been wildly successful: States are passing legislation supporting evidence-based teaching approaches , and school districts are rushing to supply training. Publishers are under pressure to drop older materials . And for the first time in years, an instructional issue—reading—is headlining education media coverage.

In the middle of all that, though, the focus on the “science of reading” has elided its twin component in literacy instruction: writing.

Writing is intrinsically important for all students to learn—after all, it is the primary way beyond speech that humans communicate. But more than that, research suggests that teaching students to write in an integrated fashion with reading is not only efficient, it’s effective.

Yet writing is often underplayed in the elementary grades. Too often, it is separated from schools’ reading block. Writing is not assessed as frequently as reading, and principals, worried about reading-exam scores, direct teachers to focus on one often at the expense of the other. Finally, beyond the English/language arts block, kids often aren’t asked to do much writing in early grades.

“Sometimes, in an early-literacy classroom, you’ll hear a teacher say, ‘It’s time to pick up your pencils,’” said Wiley Blevins, an author and literacy consultant who provides training in schools. “But your pencils should be in your hand almost the entire morning.”

Strikingly, many of the critiques that reading researchers have made against the “balanced literacy” approach that has held sway in schools for decades could equally apply to writing instruction: Foundational writing skills—like phonics and language structure—have not generally been taught systematically or explicitly.

And like the “find the main idea” strategies commonly taught in reading comprehension, writing instruction has tended to focus on content-neutral tasks, rather than deepening students’ connections to the content they learn.

Education Week wants to bring more attention to these connections in the stories that make up this special collection . But first, we want to delve deeper into the case for including writing in every step of the elementary curriculum.

Why has writing been missing from the reading conversation?

Much like the body of knowledge on how children learn to read words, it is also settled science that reading and writing draw on shared knowledge, even though they have traditionally been segmented in instruction.

“The body of research is substantial in both number of studies and quality of studies. There’s no question that reading and writing share a lot of real estate, they depend on a lot of the same knowledge and skills,” said Timothy Shanahan, an emeritus professor of education at the University of Illinois Chicago. “Pick your spot: text structure, vocabulary, sound-symbol relationships, ‘world knowledge.’”

The reasons for the bifurcation in reading and writing are legion. One is that the two fields have typically been studied separately. (Researchers studying writing usually didn’t examine whether a writing intervention, for instance, also aided students’ reading abilities—and vice versa.)

Some scholars also finger the dominance of the federally commissioned National Reading Panel report, which in 2000 outlined key instructional components of learning to read. The review didn’t examine the connection of writing to reading.

Looking even further back yields insights, too. Penmanship and spelling were historically the only parts of writing that were taught, and when writing reappeared in the latter half of the 20th century, it tended to focus on “process writing,” emphasizing personal experience and story generation over other genres. Only when the Common Core State Standards appeared in 2010 did the emphasis shift to writing about nonfiction texts and across subjects—the idea that students should be writing about what they’ve learned.

And finally, teaching writing is hard. Few studies document what preparation teachers receive to teach writing, but in surveys, many teachers say they received little training in their college education courses. That’s probably why only a little over half of teachers, in one 2016 survey, said that they enjoyed teaching writing.

Writing should begin in the early grades

These factors all work against what is probably the most important conclusion from the research over the last few decades: Students in the early-elementary grades need lots of varied opportunities to write.

“Students need support in their writing,” said Dana Robertson, an associate professor of reading and literacy education at the school of education at Virginia Tech who also studies how instructional change takes root in schools. “They need to be taught explicitly the skills and strategies of writing and they need to see the connections of reading, writing, and knowledge development.”

While research supports some fundamental tenets of writing instruction—that it should be structured, for instance, and involve drafting and revising—it hasn’t yet pointed to a specific teaching recipe that works best.

One of the challenges, the researchers note, is that while reading curricula have improved over the years, they still don’t typically provide many supports for students—or teachers, for that matter—for writing. Teachers often have to supplement with additions that don’t always mesh well with their core, grade-level content instruction.

“We have a lot of activities in writing we know are good,” Shanahan said. “We don’t really have a yearlong elementary-school-level curriculum in writing. That just doesn’t exist the way it does in reading.”

Nevertheless, practitioners like Blevins work writing into every reading lesson, even in the earliest grades. And all the components that make up a solid reading program can be enhanced through writing activities.

4 Key Things to Know About How Reading and Writing Interlock

Want a quick summary of what research tells us about the instructional connections between reading and writing?

1. Reading and writing are intimately connected.

Research on the connections began in the early 1980s and has grown more robust with time.

Among the newest and most important additions are three research syntheses conducted by Steve Graham, a professor at the University of Arizona, and his research partners. One of them examined whether writing instruction also led to improvements in students’ reading ability; a second examined the inverse question. Both found significant positive effects for reading and writing.

A third meta-analysis gets one step closer to classroom instruction. Graham and partners examined 47 studies of instructional programs that balanced both reading and writing—no program could feature more than 60 percent of one or the other. The results showed generally positive effects on both reading and writing measures.

2. Writing matters even at the earliest grades, when students are learning to read.

Studies show that the prewriting students do in early education carries meaningful signals about their decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension later on. Reading experts say that students should be supported in writing almost as soon as they begin reading, and evidence suggests that both spelling and handwriting are connected to the ability to connect speech to print and to oral language development.

3. Like reading, writing must be taught explicitly.

Writing is a complex task that demands much of students’ cognitive resources. Researchers generally agree that writing must be explicitly taught—rather than left up to students to “figure out” the rules on their own.

There isn’t as much research about how precisely to do this. One 2019 review, in fact, found significant overlap among the dozen writing programs studied, and concluded that all showed signs of boosting learning. Debates abound about the amount of structure students need and in what sequence, such as whether they need to master sentence construction before moving onto paragraphs and lengthier texts.

But in general, students should be guided on how to construct sentences and paragraphs, and they should have access to models and exemplars, the research suggests. They also need to understand the iterative nature of writing, including how to draft and revise.

A number of different writing frameworks incorporating various degrees of structure and modeling are available, though most of them have not been studied empirically.

4. Writing can help students learn content—and make sense of it.

Much of reading comprehension depends on helping students absorb “world knowledge”—think arts, ancient cultures, literature, and science—so that they can make sense of increasingly sophisticated texts and ideas as their reading improves. Writing can enhance students’ content learning, too, and should be emphasized rather than taking a back seat to the more commonly taught stories and personal reflections.

Graham and colleagues conducted another meta-analysis of nearly 60 studies looking at this idea of “writing to learn” in mathematics, science, and social studies. The studies included a mix of higher-order assignments, like analyses and argumentative writing, and lower-level ones, like summarizing and explaining. The study found that across all three disciplines, writing about the content improved student learning.

If students are doing work on phonemic awareness—the ability to recognize sounds—they shouldn’t merely manipulate sounds orally; they can put them on the page using letters. If students are learning how to decode, they can also encode—record written letters and words while they say the sounds out loud.

And students can write as they begin learning about language structure. When Blevins’ students are mainly working with decodable texts with controlled vocabularies, writing can support their knowledge about how texts and narratives work: how sentences are put together and how they can be pulled apart and reconstructed. Teachers can prompt them in these tasks, asking them to rephrase a sentence as a question, split up two sentences, or combine them.

“Young kids are writing these mile-long sentences that become second nature. We set a higher bar, and they are fully capable of doing it. We can demystify a bit some of that complex text if we develop early on how to talk about sentences—how they’re created, how they’re joined,” Blevins said. “There are all these things you can do that are helpful to develop an understanding of how sentences work and to get lots of practice.”

As students progress through the elementary grades, this structured work grows more sophisticated. They need to be taught both sentence and paragraph structure , and they need to learn how different writing purposes and genres—narrative, persuasive, analytical—demand different approaches. Most of all, the research indicates, students need opportunities to write at length often.

Using writing to support students’ exploration of content

Reading is far more than foundational skills, of course. It means introducing students to rich content and the specialized vocabulary in each discipline and then ensuring that they read, discuss, analyze, and write about those ideas. The work to systematically build students’ knowledge begins in the early grades and progresses throughout their K-12 experience.

Here again, available evidence suggests that writing can be a useful tool to help students explore, deepen, and draw connections in this content. With the proper supports, writing can be a method for students to retell and analyze what they’ve learned in discussions of content and literature throughout the school day —in addition to their creative writing.

This “writing to learn” approach need not wait for students to master foundational skills. In the K-2 grades especially, much content is learned through teacher read-alouds and conversation that include more complex vocabulary and ideas than the texts students are capable of reading. But that should not preclude students from writing about this content, experts say.

“We do a read-aloud or a media piece and we write about what we learned. It’s just a part of how you’re responding, or sharing, what you’ve learned across texts; it’s not a separate thing from reading,” Blevins said. “If I am doing read-alouds on a concept—on animal habitats, for example—my decodable texts will be on animals. And students are able to include some of these more sophisticated ideas and language in their writing, because we’ve elevated the conversations around these texts.”

In this set of stories , Education Week examines the connections between elementary-level reading and writing in three areas— encoding , language and text structure , and content-area learning . But there are so many more examples.

Please write us to share yours when you’ve finished.

Want to read more about the research that informed this story? Here’s a bibliography to start you off.

Berninger V. W., Abbott, R. D., Abbott, S. P., Graham S., & Richards T. (2002). Writing and reading: Connections between language by hand and language by eye. J ournal of Learning Disabilities. Special Issue: The Language of Written Language, 35(1), 39–56 Berninger, Virginia, Robert D. Abbott, Janine Jones, Beverly J. Wolf, Laura Gould, Marci Anderson-Younstrom, Shirley Shimada, Kenn Apel. (2006) “Early development of language by hand: composing, reading, listening, and speaking connections; three letter-writing modes; and fast mapping in spelling.” Developmental Neuropsychology, 29(1), pp. 61-92 Cabell, Sonia Q, Laura S. Tortorelli, and Hope K. Gerde (2013). “How Do I Write…? Scaffolding Preschoolers’ Early Writing Skills.” The Reading Teacher, 66(8), pp. 650-659. Gerde, H.K., Bingham, G.E. & Wasik, B.A. (2012). “Writing in Early Childhood Classrooms: Guidance for Best Practices.” Early Childhood Education Journal 40, 351–359 (2012) Gilbert, Jennifer, and Steve Graham. (2010). “Teaching Writing to Elementary Students in Grades 4–6: A National Survey.” The Elementary School Journal 110(44) Graham, Steve, et al. (2017). “Effectiveness of Literacy Programs Balancing Reading and Writing Instruction: A Meta-Analysis.” Reading Research Quarterly, 53(3) pp. 279–304 Graham, Steve, and Michael Hebert. (2011). “Writing to Read: A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Writing and Writing Instruction on Reading.” Harvard Educational Review (2011) 81(4): 710–744. Graham, Steve. (2020). “The Sciences of Reading and Writing Must Become More Fully Integrated.” Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1) pp. S35–S44 Graham, Steve, Sharlene A. Kiuhara, and Meade MacKay. (2020).”The Effects of Writing on Learning in Science, Social Studies, and Mathematics: A Meta-Analysis.” Review of Educational Research April 2020, Vol 90, No. 2, pp. 179–226 Shanahan, Timothy. “History of Writing and Reading Connections.” in Shanahan, Timothy. (2016). “Relationships between reading and writing development.” In C. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (2nd ed., pp. 194–207). New York, NY: Guilford. Slavin, Robert, Lake, C., Inns, A., Baye, A., Dachet, D., & Haslam, J. (2019). “A quantitative synthesis of research on writing approaches in grades 2 to 12.” London: Education Endowment Foundation. Troia, Gary. (2014). Evidence-based practices for writing instruction (Document No. IC-5). Retrieved from University of Florida, Collaboration for Effective Educator, Development, Accountability, and Reform Center website: http://ceedar.education.ufl.edu/tools/innovation-configuration/ Troia, Gary, and Steve Graham. (2016).“Common Core Writing and Language Standards and Aligned State Assessments: A National Survey of Teacher Beliefs and Attitudes.” Reading and Writing 29(9).

A version of this article appeared in the January 25, 2023 edition of Education Week as How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’?

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