When my children swapped My First Words and I Want My Hat Back for more “grown-up” reads, I found myself unable to get rid of their well-thumbed copies. Instead, I squirreled those books away for posterity. 

Now, years later, even hearing mention of these titles is enough to make me smile. Why? 

The answer is that there is something magical about sharing a storybook with a young child. 

For the child, shared reading offers vital early literacy development. We know that reading to a child daily exposes them to a wealth of language that will give them the firmest foundation to go on to read well, and to read for pleasure.

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But there may be even more to the experience than we thought. A new long-term study from Finland shows just how wide-reaching those effects can be. A team of researchers, led by Minna Torppa, investigated the impact that shared reading and the “home literacy environment” has on young children over an extended period of their lives - from age 2 to age 15. 

The study, Long-term effects of the home literacy environment on reading development: familial risk for dyslexia as a moderator (2022), found that “shared book reading predicted vocabulary development and reading motivation”. It also revealed that “vocabulary, reading fluency and shared reading” are strong predictors of successful reading for children with a familial risk of dyslexia.

Literacy: The impact of shared reading

In other words, it suggests that shared reading may be an essential early priority, and even a protective factor, for children who are more likely to struggle with reading comprehension later on.

Plenty of other studies repeat the message that shared reading can have a real impact on future outcomes. For instance, a 2018 study by Levine et al, Parents’ early book reading to children: relation to children’s later language and literacy outcomes controlling for other parent language input, reveals one reason why this is the case. The researchers found that the language used by parents/caregivers during shared reading is “more sophisticated” in terms of “vocabulary diversity and syntactic complexity” than in other instances of parent-child talk. 

Supporting shared reading will already be a priority for most schools. But while it is easy to make this activity happen in the classroom, it is typically a lot more challenging to support it outside of the school gates.

A multi-faceted approach to engaging parents

So, what can schools do? For parents and caregivers who already struggle to sustain shared reading with their child, simply “gifting” them books is not a solution. Instead, a multi-faceted approach will likely be required: sharing books, providing high-quality reading instruction, modelling reading and offering timely nudges are all meaningful and manageable steps that schools can take.

Meanwhile, within school, teachers can ensure that lots of high-quality shared reading and book talk infuses the day; and leaders can focus school improvement priorities on increasing reading quality and practice. Providing additional training for early years practitioners, teachers and teaching assistants on the subtleties of sophisticated book talk and on reading development may help here.

Shared reading makes a difference, particularly for those children who are most likely to struggle with reading - that means that we all need to do as much as we can to maximise the opportunities for all children to experience its magic.