Until what age to read aloud: there is a number

There was a year it stopped. It was almost never decided: they learned to read on their own, the routine shifted, and one night the book stayed in their room.

Whether that was fine has an answer with a number in it.

Until seventh or eighth grade — around twelve or thirteen. The reason: all through elementary school, the ceiling on what a child understands by reading is set by what they understand by ear. And that ceiling runs well ahead for years.

This is reason 2 of ten reasons someone won’t read, from the bridge side.

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).

Translated to a household: all through elementary school there is a band of stories, ideas and words your child follows perfectly when somebody reads them aloud, and cannot reach alone yet. That band is the reason to keep going.

Two notes on the figure, so it gets used well. It comes from a research synthesis published in 2003, itself resting 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 the calendar go.

Why: the ear sets the ceiling

The mechanism sits in one sentence of the same text: “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, holding the characters, catching the irony. While the first costs effort, the second gets whatever is left over.

When somebody reads aloud, the decoding job disappears entirely. All of their capacity to understand becomes available for the story, which is where the good part is.

That is why an eight-year-old can follow, by ear, a novel they would abandon on page twelve reading it themselves.

What a child who can already read gains

Three concrete things, none of them sentimental.

Vocabulary that conversation does not 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 sits in the piece on graphic novels.

Long structures. A sentence with three levels of subordination is understood by ear long before it is understood on the page. Hearing them is how they get learned.

The time itself. Fifteen minutes a day with somebody reading to them is one of the few things in early adolescence that can be scheduled without negotiation.

And a note on differences, worth looking at without labelling anyone: the gap between children in listening vocabulary is wide and 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 room there is to gain through the ear, and it describes groups. About one particular child it says very little.

Why it stops too early

Almost never for pedagogical reasons. For three nobody says out loud:

• It looks like coddling. The most common one, and it comes from outside the house.
• They said they can read on their own now. Which is true, and a different matter from the one being discussed.
• The routine moved. Bedtime changed, a sibling arrived, an activity started.

None of the three has anything to do with what gets gained. And the first one is answered by 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 is the part nobody explains.

1. Raise the level of the book. The target is exactly what they would not read alone. If they can read it unaided, let them read it unaided.
2. Chapters, with no obligation to finish. One a night, stopping where it gets good.
3. Give them the chooser’s role. Let them pick between two, and let them veto.
4. Somewhere else. The kitchen while you cook, the car, the sofa. Bed already has its own negotiation on it.
5. Take turns if they want. A page you, a page them. And when they tire of their page, you carry on without commenting.
6. Read it aloud the way things get read aloud. Short sentences, pauses, no fear of doing voices. The guide to writing a story carries the test: if you run out of breath, the sentence was long.

And if you cannot be the voice every day, an audiobook does part of this job. With its limit, explained in the piece on formats: it holds up the story, and decoding practice happens separately.

Where to start

Tonight, without announcing that anything is starting again: sit down with a book that is too big for them and read a chapter. If they say they can read on their own now, tell them you know, and carry on 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