Sooner or later, somebody at the table says the word cheating. If they listen instead of reading, that’s cheating. If all they ever pick up is graphic novels, that’s cheating too. And if the type is big, well, that’s a baby book.
The evidence on each of these points in a different direction, and one of the answers will probably surprise you.
Format is the cheapest of ten reasons a child won’t read to change: one library loan and one afternoon. There are four ways in, and this piece sorts them by what’s actually known about each, including one that half the internet recommends and the studies argue against.
Do audiobooks count as reading?
For understanding a story, one study says yes. Adults were split into three groups: one read a book on a tablet, one listened to it, and one did both at once. In the words of Beth Rogowsky, who ran it: “What we found is it didn’t matter whether these adults read the book from an e-tablet, listened to an audio version of the book, or did both simultaneously, comprehension was equal” (Tech & Learning).
Now the limit, which comes from the same person and almost never travels alongside the headline. Those participants were 91 college-educated adults: readers who were already fully formed. About children who are still learning, Rogowsky adds a warning: “That becomes an issue when instead of teaching our students how to read, we’re letting them just listen to audiobooks for longer periods of time, especially in our English classes.”
Put the two sentences side by side and you get the real advice, which beats either one alone:
- Audio carries the story. Understanding, following a plot, meeting characters, soaking up vocabulary, needing to know what happens next. It works beautifully there.
- Decoding gets practiced by decoding. That needs eyes on letters, even just a few short ones a day.
So audio earns its place for what it is, and reading practice happens alongside it, in small doses. The audiobook on the drive to Grandma’s and two pages read aloud at bedtime are two different things, and both fit in the same week. Listening, by the way, keeps paying off for years: read-aloud time matters much longer than most people think.
What if they only want graphic novels?
Then they read. A graphic novel asks a lot of its reader: follow a sequence, keep characters in mind, infer what happened in the gap between two panels, and read a mood off a drawn face. That leap between panels is comprehension work of the best kind.
And there’s a number that settles the vocabulary question, too. It has its own article, and it’s the one to show the relative who says comics don’t count.
The thing to check here is the definition being used at home. When a child hears that their thing doesn’t count, they learn two lessons at once: that reading is boring, and that they’re bad at it.
Do dyslexia fonts actually help?
This one runs against the current, so read it before you download anything.
An experiment tested the OpenDyslexic font with twelve students with dyslexia, in grades 3 through 6, against Arial and Times New Roman. The finding: “no improvement in reading rate or accuracy for individual students with dyslexia, as well as the group as a whole.” On accuracy it did worse: it “produced negative results, or decreased students’ outcomes compared to both Arial and TNR, on all three reading tasks.” And the students themselves weren’t won over: “while some students commented that the font was ‘new’ or ‘different’, none of the participants reported preferring to read material presented in that font” (Annals of Dyslexia, 2016).
Twelve participants is a small sample, and that deserves saying. What holds the argument up is the direction of the effect plus the fact that nobody preferred it. A later study of another font of the same kind found no benefit either.
What does help, and costs nothing. What relieves a crowded page is the space around the letters:
| What to change | Why it works |
|---|---|
| Larger type | Less effort per character, and the eye jumps less |
| More space between lines | The single biggest help for keeping your place |
| Shorter lines | The trip back to the left margin comes more often |
| Wider margins, less text per page | Less page at once, and a feeling of progress |
| Matte paper instead of glossy | No glare scattering the letters |
On an e-reader, all of that adjusts in thirty seconds, and it outperforms any branded typeface.
What does a picture book do that a chapter book doesn’t?
It shares the work. In a picture book, the illustrations carry half the story, so the reader holds less text to get the same amount of story.
Families often retire the format early, because “they’re too old for that.” And out the door goes a format that holds nine- and ten-year-olds perfectly well when the writing is good. A picture book with a serious story, read at ten, is a different object from the same book at four: the child has changed, and so has what they see on the page.
If the question is about length, three things you can measure with the book in your hands will settle it.
How to test a format in one week
No shopping required. Library, loan, one week per format:
| Format | What to try | What to watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Graphic novel | One from a long series | Whether they ask for the next one |
| Picture book | One with a real story in it | Whether they stop on a page just to look |
| Audiobook | In the car, or while they draw | Whether they ask what happened next |
| Large print | The same title they already abandoned | Whether they get past page ten this time |
That last row is the cleanest experiment there is: same text, different presentation. If large print gets them moving, the page was the problem all along.
Where to start
This week, borrow one format your house hasn’t tried yet. Most public libraries in the United States and Canada lend children’s audiobooks and e-books for free with a library card, often through apps like Libby, and that’s the cheapest way to find out whether the ear is the way in for your reader.
In the meantime, stories hold up beautifully read aloud: the guide to writing a story at home was made to be read out loud, which is how stories get finished.
And if changing format changes nothing, there are nine more causes in the ten reasons.
Where these numbers come from
- Rogowsky, Calhoun and Tallal, “Does Modality Matter? The Effects of Reading, Listening, and Dual Modality on Comprehension,” SAGE Open, 2016. Rogowsky quoted by Tech & Learning. Source
- Wery, Jessica J. and Diliberto, Jennifer A., “The effect of a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, on reading rate and accuracy,” Annals of Dyslexia 67(2), 2016. Source
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