Literacy news
New Zealand research into children’s reading released
15 Jan 2010
The author of new research into children’s reading skills, Dr Sebastian Suggate from the University of Otago in New Zealand, said he decided to carry out the research because, apart from a small study from 1974, he was unable to find any research to support the widely held view that children should learn to read from the age of five.
The three year research project involved 400 New Zealand children and compared the abilities of children from Rudolf Steiner schools, who do not start learning to read until they are seven, with children from state run primary schools.
The research found that by the age of 11 there was no difference between children who started to read at age five and those at the Steiner schools who started reading later. The research also found that by eight or nine, the lower performing readers had caught up with the earlier higher performing readers. All the Steiner schools involved in the study were state funded and children were from varied socioeconomic backgrounds.
Dr Suggate stressed the importance of early language development, which he said was 'in many cases' a better predictor of children's later reading abilities than early reading.
He added that if there were ‘not any advantages to learning to read from the age of five, could there be disadvantages to starting teaching children to read earlier? In other words, we could be putting them off.'
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