Global study demonstrates the value of reading to babies from birth

Children who have been read to regularly from birth are more likely to know letters and words, and to speak using complex sentences by the time they are three years of age, an Australian led study has shown. 

Led by Macquarie University PhD candidate Claire Galea, the world’s largest study on the impact of book reading worked with United Way Australia and the Dollywood Foundation to send books to 86,000 new parents in Australia, the US, Canada, Britain and Ireland.

Specifically the study involved 343 families in the regional New South Wales town of Tamworth, where a local preschool has adapted its literacy program to ­account for children’s improved literacy.

“Reading to a child four days a week from birth, for 10 to 15 minutes each time, means they are more likely to show emerging literacy skills before they start school,’’ Ms Galea said when speaking with The Australian. 

“They can retell a sequence of events from a book and build their vocabulary.”

In addition children were eight times more likely to be interested in reading when exposed to books in the home for 12 months.

Unfortunately one in six Australian children has not been read to or told a story by the time they turn two years of age, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).

These children, Ms Galea said, were more likely to start school behind their peers. Sadly, some of these children do not even have knowledge of how to hold or interact with a book because they have not been exposed to reading. 

Children who had been exposed to reading in their home environment, however, had the capacity to track words from left to right, and to act out stories and scenarios based on characters from familiar texts. 

Parents who participated in the program read to their three year old children more often (74 per cent compared to the national average of 58 per cent) and felt more connected to their children as a result of reading the books provided through the program. 

“The importance of access to physical books in the home may be a fundamental step in helping to address the current literacy ­crisis,” Ms Galea said. 

To progress her findings Ms Galea plans to track the children’s progress through NAPLAN results once they enter school. 

Tamworth Library is also supporting the families involved in the program, and others in the community, by offering literacy classes for those parents who struggle with reading. 

The books used in the study were provided through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library and United Way Australia, which gifted some 1.3 million books to 43,000 children over the past 11 years.

This work was originally covered in The Australian. Find the original coverage here.

To access Ms Galea’s work please see here.