Which children in your class most enjoy reading? Is it the ones who struggle with literacy, or the ones who don’t?
Most likely, the answer will be the latter: children who are the more proficient readers tend to read for pleasure more often. The assumption is that their tendency to read for pleasure will then help to further boost their reading skill.
But, according to Dr Elsje van Bergen, an associate professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, we need to question this reciprocal narrative.
She believes it’s not OK to simply assume that a child who is good at reading will enjoy it more, and that a child who enjoys reading will be better at it; the connection between reading ability and reading enjoyment is, she says, a lot more complex.
In a study published in September, she set out to investigate this link in more detail and found that some differences in literacy skill and enjoyment can be explained by genetics.
The research involved 3,690 sets of 12-year-old Finnish twins. The twins were asked two questions - “Do you enjoy reading?” and “Do you enjoy writing?” - and given three options: yes, no, sometimes. Teachers were then asked to rate the children’s literacy skill in spelling, writing, reading fluency and reading comprehension.
The researchers translated these ratings into two summary scores and analysed them to see how they correlated. They found what most literature already tells us: children with good literacy skills tend to enjoy reading and writing more.
However, there’s more to it, says van Bergen.
“To put it into perspective, if you look at the good readers, 43 per cent of them say they like reading. Around 23 per cent of average readers and 4 per cent of very poor readers say they do, too,” she explains.
There were enormous individual differences in children’s literacy skills, and enjoyment of literacy, then. But, because the study uses twins, researchers were able to go one step further and investigate why these differences occur.
The logic behind the twin method, van Bergen says, is that identical (monozygotic) twins share all their genes, and non-identical (fraternal) twins share half of their genes - the same as any siblings do. By analysing the results of work with both groups, researchers can measure the impact genetics has on certain characteristics and skills.
In this study, van Bergen found that both differences in literacy skill and literacy enjoyment are influenced by genetics: it accounts for 70 per cent of skill, and 35 per cent of enjoyment.
“Parents and children tend to resemble each other in these things,” she explains. “These findings suggest that the resemblance in literacy skills is mostly because (biological) parents provide their offspring with their genes.
“For literacy enjoyment, in contrast, these findings suggest that parents and offspring tend to resemble each other because of the genes, but also because of the environment parents create.”
We can feel very confident in these findings because, as van Bergen explains, this study is actually the third in a series looking at the link between genetics and literacy skill and enjoyment. The first took place in the Netherlands, the second in the US - and both of those reported similar findings.
So, if genetics accounts for much of reading skill, and only around a third of reading enjoyment, does this mean that teachers have more scope to help children develop their reading enjoyment than to help those who struggle with reading skill?
No, stresses van Bergen.
“Teachers are the reason why children can read and write, so they are hugely important,” she says. “We know that children’s reading ability differs: if you were to look at it on a graph, it would be a bell curve. However, if you improved reading education for everybody, everyone would shift to the right, everyone would be a bit better.”
So, what can teachers take away here?
In some ways, this study confirms what teachers already know to be true: that problems with literacy are often intergenerational issues, and some children are “naturally” better at reading than others - but that this alone does not determine a child’s reading future.
“We need all children to have at least sufficient literacy skills in our literate society. This research just stresses how important the role of the teacher is in helping them get there,” says van Bergen.
This might mean, she says, focusing our attention on poor readers and doing everything possible to “give them a better environment, more stimulation and one-to-one teaching to try to push them more to the average”.
Schools, of course, are already well aware of the need to support struggling readers, and there are a wealth of strategies out there to help them to deliver on this.
For example, the Education Endowment Foundation highlights that reading comprehension can be improved by explicitly teaching students techniques to help them comprehend meaning, such as summarising or identifying key points; using graphic or semantic organisers; and monitoring their own comprehension and then identifying and resolving difficulties for themselves.
The key takeaway from this research, then, is to understand that while there is a genetic influence on literacy skill and reading enjoyment, the importance of working with children who are more likely to struggle remains as important as ever.
