Promoting reading 1
Chapter 3. Early reading stimulation Children who
read better than their contemporaries read more, and thus become even better readers. Children who do not read well, read less, with the result that they fall even further behind. This has been referred to as reading’s “Matthew effect”. A “Matthew effect” means essentially that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer – the effect is named after the verse in the Bible’s Gospel according to Matthew, which says that “Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them”. The Matthew effect has been used to explain the gradually increasing gap between strong and weak readers (Stanovich 1986). The Matthew effect in the context of reading argues for reading motivation and literacy being mutually interdependent. Children who learn how to decode text early tend to accumulate positive experiences of reading. Reading becomes a part of their own identity and it then becomes natural to seek additional reading experiences. The consequence of this is an upward spiral with rapid progress in literacy and reading activity. Conversely, children who are late in learning to read tend to read less, which means less practice. They don’t identify themselves as readers and ultimately avoid reading altogether. Researchers have shown that the Matthew effect does not apply to all readers (Scarborough & Parker 2003). Literature educationalist Gunilla Molloy (2007) has pointed out the risk of the Matthew effect giving rise to negative thought patterns in the pedagogical context – weak readers being regarded as hopeless cases. On a more positive note, the Matthew effect is indicative of the importance of early interventions to strengthen the child’s positive relationship to literature and reading. That the home is often the place where the child’s reading interests take shape seems intuitively reasonable and there is evidence of this in many quarters. The research points to a strong correlation between access to written language in the home and developed literacy. Being surrounded by individuals who read, having access to books, magazines and newspapers in the home, and simply being in an environment where reading is valued are all essential for a child to become a competent reader (Eurydice 2011). Parental engagement is particularly important for the child’s reading development. Parents who enjoy reading and want to share the experience with their children convey a positive attitude to reading, which can be crucial to a child’s literacy. Early reading activities in the home lay a foundation for the child learning to read in school. There is consensus among researchers about the significance of parents for the child’s early language learning. In the research on the influence of the family and home environment on the child’s reading development, there are plenty of examples of the long-term effects of early parental engagement – for an overview, see for example Bonci (2011) and Eurydice (2011). In her thesis Tidig språkstimulering av barn (Early language stimulation in children) (1993), Ann-Katrin Svensson points out that the importance of early language stimulation is consistently emphasised in various research orientations. Svensson summarises the conclusions of some of the research on the importance of 29