There are many types of text found in classrooms. Some, such as levelled and decodable texts, are designed to support children learning to read. They do this by carefully controlling the difficulty of a reading task - simplifying language, the number of words in the text, or the number of phoneme-grapheme correspondences required to read them.

By contrast, “real” books are designed to tell a story; they are rich in language and ideas, and are perfect for sharing.

In both cases, the texts are generally accompanied by illustrations. Of course, these are colourful and make the text attractive, but are they helpful or simply a distraction?

The goal of reading, in any situation, is to gain meaning from the text, to understand the message the author is trying to convey. The Simple View of Reading model (Gough and Tumner, 1986) suggests that reading develops along two different aspects - word decoding, and language comprehension. Studies such as that by Oakhill and Cain (2012) suggest that these two aspects depend on children developing different skills.

Decoding vs comprehending

What helps a child to decode words (recognising letters, linking them to sounds and blending the sounds together) is not the same as what helps a child to develop the comprehension of language.

For the latter, it appears that younger children can fail to make the spontaneous leaps in connection between relevant ideas, both within and outside of the text, to develop a rich and full understanding. They are less effective at making inferences and can fail to make them without support.

So can illustrations help? By presenting text with and without corresponding illustrations, dozens of studies have demonstrated that pictures help readers to remember specific and concrete information from a text and learn new vocabulary - the pictures seem to draw attention to the most important aspects of the text and support the children to make the necessary connections.

For example, a study by Pike et al (2009) presented children with a number of short stories. These were shown in different ways: with a picture directly underneath representing information that aided understanding; with a picture underneath that illustrated an unhelpful or insignificant part of the story; or with no picture at all. The children’s ability to read and understand the stories was analysed, using a range of different assessments.

The results for children aged 7 and above showed that the pictures were very important. Consistently, the stories with no illustrations and unhelpful illustrations were less well understood and the children found them harder to read. In contrast, a careful picture, which illustrated the main inferences needed, seemed to support the children to spontaneously and independently make the connections between the ideas in the stories and remember more.

So, when you are choosing the next book for the children in your class to read, look closely at the pictures - do they help to paint a thousand words?

Megan Dixon is director of literacy at the Aspire Educational Trust

This article originally appeared in the 28 June 2019 issue under the headline “Illustrations help us to get the picture”