Despite what your parents tell you, pointing is not always rude. In fact, for babies, it plays an important role in the development of language. Studies have shown that babies’ use of the pointing gesture at 12 months is a good predictor of their vocabulary size later on in life (bit.ly/PointingLanguage).

And what about non-verbal communication? Without the use of an extended index finger, communication in many scenarios would be much harder - the phrase ‘over there’ would largely be rendered, erm, pointless.

Then there is that ubiquitous part of every early years foundation stage setting and key stage 1 classroom: following the text with your finger. That must have some strong evidence behind it, right?

Perhaps surprisingly, it doesn’t.

Professor Rhona Stainthorp, reading expert at the University of Reading and language consultant to the Alphablocks programme on CBeebies, explains that finger-pointing at the text can certainly help a learner develop fundamental knowledge of the way text moves across the page. “When children start school, many of them do have a very good left-right awareness, but not all do,” she says. “If they’ve not had these experiences with a moving finger going along a line, they don’t realise that print moves across the page.

“For adults it feels instinctive, but it only makes sense because that’s what we’ve learned. One always has to remember that some scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew, go from right to left, classic Japanese and Chinese go from top to bottom as well - it’s cultural rather than instinctive.”

She explains that pointing at individual words helps children to map what they see and hear, too - after all, spoken words don’t necessarily have gaps between them, while written ones do.

“When you’re 4 or 5, unless you’ve got the concept of those very tiny little spaces between words in print, you don’t know what is a word and what isn’t,” Stainthorp says. “By [having] it being pointed out to you and [seeing] that finger moving on, then you’re beginning to map the sound and the word.”

Despite all this, however, the effectiveness of finger-pointing in the development of reading is relatively unexplored by academics. But what is out there is encouraging. For example, studies have shown that young children “infrequently” look at the print in a storybook and are more interested in the illustrations - as parents and practitioners might suspect. If the adult who is reading the story points at the text, it draws the child’s attention.

One experimental study from the University of Guelph in Canada found that children aged 3-5 spent just 2 per cent of their time looking at the print in a storybook when there was no pointing at the text by the adult reading aloud (bit.ly/AttentionToPrint). But pointing to the words increased print-looking time for all age groups, and four-year-olds remembered more words from the text.

Handy studies

Then there is the bulk of research looking at “finger-point reading”. Here, learners point at words in a text they have already memorised and “pretend read” them aloud. Work by the late academic Joanna Uhry and others has concluded that this technique could help learners develop their reading further and assist them in graduating to “real” reading (see bit.ly/JKUhry2009 and bit.ly/EhriSweet).

And Stainthorp adds that there is a body of evidence suggesting a multisensory approach to learning to read could be beneficial - something highlighted in Jim Rose’s 2006 Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading (bit.ly/EarlyReadingRev).

“Generally speaking, there’s evidence that a multisensory approach to teaching and learning is positive…if you’ve got your finger pointing at the words, in that sense that could be considered to be adding another sense that might therefore be helpful,” says Stainthorp.

Beyond this, though, is there any evidence that finger-pointing can help every apprentice reader? No, says Stainthorp. In fact, while some readers will benefit from finger-pointing due to a lack of guidance at home, she says that it would not be useful for the precocious readers she has studied who could already read before coming to school for the first time. And she adds that there will be other children who will only need a “very limited” amount of time spent finger-pointing the text. But it “wouldn’t do any harm” if they did do it, she clarifies.

Checking the index

Why, then, is there not more work on this, considering every classroom does it? It should be recognised that simple answers here are not easy - unpicking the development of reading is incredibly complex and isolating single factors such as finger-pointing is fraught with difficulties.

So, it’s important to view finger-pointing as one of several potential indicators of reading development, not something on a checklist that needs to be ticked off for every pupil, says Laura Shapiro, senior lecturer in psychology at Aston University, who specialises in studying early reading skills.

“The research on finger-point reading - that is, pointing to the words while reciting a familiar book - suggests that this is one indicator of children’s early literacy skills,” she says. “It is quite possible that this is simply a sign that children are developing their understanding of text, and if they don’t do it spontaneously, that doesn’t mean they lack the concept.

“Having said that, there may well be situations when encouraging a child to follow text with their finger is a good idea, for example, if they are making mistakes that suggest they aren’t accurately tracking the words on the page: missing the end of a word, skipping a line etc.”

If a child does follow the text with their finger, or you feel it might be useful for them to do so, is there a right or a wrong way to use the technique?

Stainthorp says it does not matter whether learners use a finger or a “wand”, as in some reading schemes.

Reading apps and other screen-based reading programs might use a bouncy ball going along the word or have the words change colour as they are read out, karaoke-style. These might also serve the same purpose, although the active, multisensory aspect would be missing, says Stainthorp.

And what about using a ruler to progress down the page, uncovering each new line as the child reads?

“If you’re doing that, the rule is simply going down the page and covering up the text. If you were needing to do that then the children shouldn’t be reading a whole page full of print,” suggests Stainthorp.

So, on balance, should you be telling children to follow the text with their finger (or a wand or ruler)?

A lack of empirical evidence does not necessarily mean a lack of utility - it just means it has not been looked at enough yet. Until that work is done, it’s sensible not to force it on a child if they don’t seem to need it, but if you do think it will help, go for it. As Stainthorp said earlier, it’s unlikely to do any harm. After all, it’s just a little point in the right direction.

Irena Barker is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 9 October 2020 issue under the headline “Tes focus on… Following text with your finger”