There was a year when it stopped. Almost nobody decides it. They learned to read on their own, the evenings got busier, a new activity took over Tuesdays, and one night the book simply stayed in their room. Nobody noticed it was the last time.
Whether that was fine has an answer, and the answer comes with a number.
Until seventh or eighth grade, around twelve or thirteen. The reason: all through elementary school, the ceiling on what a child can understand by reading is set by what they can understand by ear. And for years, the ear runs well ahead.
This is one of ten reasons a child won’t read, seen from the side of the bridge between listening and reading.
Until what age? The short answer
Andrew Biemiller, of the Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto, put it this way: “average children don’t reach the point of being able to read what they could understand if they heard it until around 7th or 8th grade” (American Educator, 2003).
For a family, that means that all through elementary school there’s a band of stories, ideas and words that your child follows perfectly when someone reads them aloud, and can’t yet reach alone. That band is the reason to keep going.
The figure needs two notes to be used well. It comes from a research synthesis published in 2003, which rests in turn on work from the eighties, and the question has been re-examined since. Take it as an order of magnitude, the whole of elementary school, and let go of the exact birthday.
Why: the ear sets the ceiling
The mechanism sits in one sentence of the same article: “during elementary school, a child’s maximum level of reading comprehension is determined by the child’s level of listening comprehension.”
Reading does two jobs at once. One is decoding, turning letters into words. The other is understanding: following the plot, keeping the characters straight, catching the joke. While the first one still takes effort, the second gets whatever is left over.
When someone reads aloud, the decoding job disappears entirely. All of a child’s capacity to understand is free for the story, which is where the good part lives.
That’s why an eight-year-old can follow, by ear, a novel they’d abandon on page twelve if they read it themselves, and ask for “just one more chapter” with a straight face.
What a child who can already read gains
Three concrete gains.
Vocabulary that conversation can’t supply. Adult books carry 52.7 rare words per thousand, and children’s books 30.9. Conversation between two college graduates carries 17.3 (Cunningham and Stanovich, 1998). A book read aloud above their level hands them words that neither their day nor their own reading will. The full table is in the article on graphic novels.
Long sentences. A sentence with three layers of clauses is understood by ear long before it’s understood on the page. Hearing them is how they get learned.
The time itself. Fifteen minutes a day with someone reading to them is one of the few things in the early teen years that can be scheduled without a negotiation.
One note on differences, to read without labeling anyone: the gap between children in listening vocabulary is wide, and it shows up early. Biemiller sizes it by saying that a sixth grader at the 25th percentile has the listening vocabulary a 75th-percentile third grader already had. That describes how much there is to gain through the ear, and it describes groups. About one particular child, it says very little.
There’s a fourth gain, and it’s for the grown-up. Reading aloud belongs to both people on the couch. The book you’d never have picked for yourself, the chapter that made you both laugh at the same line: the adult’s curiosity gets fed too.
Why it stops too early
Rarely for teaching reasons. Usually for three that nobody says out loud:
- It looks like babying them. The most common one, and it tends to come from outside the house.
- They said they can read on their own now. Which is true, and a different question from the one here.
- The routine moved. Bedtime changed, a baby arrived, soccer started.
All three are about the calendar, and none of them touches what gets gained. The first one has its answer in the figure above: seventh or eighth grade.
How to read aloud to a ten-year-old
It works differently from reading to a five-year-old, and that’s the part nobody explains.
- Raise the level of the book. The target is exactly what they wouldn’t read alone. If they can read it unaided, let them read it unaided.
- Chapters, with no obligation to finish. One a night, stopping right where it gets good.
- Give them the chooser’s role. Let them pick between two, and let them veto.
- Try somewhere new. The kitchen while you cook, the car, the couch. Bedtime already has its own negotiations.
- Take turns if they want to. A page for you, a page for them. And when they tire of their page, carry on without comment.
- Read it the way stories are meant to be read aloud. Short sentences, pauses, and no fear of doing voices. The guide to writing a story has the test: if you run out of breath, the sentence was too long.
And if you can’t be the voice every day, an audiobook does part of this job. With its limit, explained in the article on formats: it carries the story, and decoding practice happens separately. On the busiest nights, five minutes of reading together keeps the thread alive.
Where to start
Tonight, without announcing that anything is starting again: sit down with a book that’s a little too big for them and read one chapter. If they say they can read on their own now, tell them you know, and keep reading.
And if the problem turns out to be something else, there are nine more reasons in the ten, ordered from the cheapest to rule out to the slowest to change.
Where these numbers come from
- Biemiller, Andrew, “Oral Comprehension Sets the Ceiling on Reading Comprehension,” American Educator, Spring 2003. The author is at the Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto. The seventh-or-eighth-grade figure comes from a synthesis of earlier research, and the question has been re-examined since. Source
- Cunningham, Anne E. and Stanovich, Keith E., “What Reading Does for the Mind,” American Educator, 1998. Table 1, adapted from Hayes and Ahrens (1988). Source
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