To read or not to read

There is a widely held belief that reading (story)books makes us smarter and helps promote success in life. Does scientific evidence support this notion? The three meta-analyses in this thesis comprise 146 studies between 1988 and 2010 (N=10,308 participants) that addressed the role of book reading in language and reading development from infancy to early adulthood. Chapter 2 shows that reading routines that are part of children’s and students’ leisure-time activities offer substantial advantages for the development of language, reading, and spelling proficiency and academic success. The finding that leisure-time reading becomes increasingly more important across education seems natural: Because more skilled readers are more likely to enjoy books, they will choose to read more frequently which, in turn, will improve knowledge of word forms and semantics and enhance vocabulary size and text comprehension abilities. It appears from intervention studies comprising 2-6 year old children that it makes sense to invest in improvement of the quality of adult-child book sharing. Training parents or preschool and kindergarten teachers intensively in interactive reading techniques (e.g., dialogic reading programs) appears to be a promising venue to expand pre-conventional readers’ oral language (see chapters 3 and 4) as well as knowledge about the basics of reading (see chapter 4).