What Really Makes a Good Reader?
AWhen a child struggles to learn to read, the adults around them often reach for a simple explanation. Some assume that the child is simply less intelligent than their classmates; others suspect a problem with the eyes, or with the way the brain handles what the eyes see. Such explanations are understandable, but they can do real harm. A label of low intelligence, once attached, is hard to remove, and a mistaken diagnosis can send parents and teachers in search of remedies that do not address the actual difficulty. A large new analysis of how thinking skills relate to reading suggests that both of these popular assumptions deserve to be questioned.
BThe study was led by Daniel Hajovsky, an associate professor of educational psychology at Texas A&M University, working with colleagues from the University of Kansas, St John's University, Montclair State University and Temple University. Rather than running a single new experiment, the team set out to combine the evidence that already existed. They gathered around 50,000 correlations, drawn from 137 different batteries of cognitive and achievement tests, and merged them into one statistical model. Their aim, as the title of their paper in the Journal of Intelligence makes clear, was to move towards a "consensus model" of how cognitive abilities and reading achievement are related. An approach of this kind has an obvious strength: no single sample of children, however carefully chosen, can carry as much weight as tens of thousands of results pooled together. It also has a limitation, since the conclusions can only be as good as the tests and studies on which they are based.
CThe first surprise concerned visual processing, the ability to perceive, analyse and think with visual patterns. Given that reading involves looking at marks on a page, it might seem natural to expect this skill to play an important part. Yet the analysis found no meaningful relationship between visual processing and reading ability. This does not mean that eyesight is irrelevant, since a child who cannot see the page clearly will obviously struggle. It does, however, cast doubt on the idea that weaknesses in handling visual information lie behind most reading problems.
DGeneral intelligence was also linked to reading, but its role turned out to be smaller than some earlier work had suggested. Earlier studies had often given it a central place in explaining why some children read better than others. Hajovsky described it as "less dominant than in some earlier meta-analyses". This finding matters well beyond the research community. If general intelligence is not the main driver of reading success, then a child's difficulty with reading cannot be taken as a reliable sign that the child is unintelligent. The researchers themselves stress this point, and it is perhaps the most important message for families: a struggling reader is not necessarily a less able learner.
EInstead, the strongest predictors of reading were two abilities that receive comparatively little public attention. The first is auditory processing, which includes the capacity to recognise and tell apart the individual sounds that make up spoken words. This skill supports decoding, the process of linking written letters to the sounds they represent, which forms the foundation of early reading. Without it, a child may find it hard to work out a word that they have never seen in print before. The second is comprehension-knowledge: the vocabulary, concepts and background information that a child builds up through learning and everyday experience. A child may decode every word of a sentence correctly and still fail to understand it if the words and ideas are unfamiliar. Other abilities, such as memory, reasoning and processing speed, also made a contribution, but they played supporting rather than leading roles.
FFor teachers, the practical implication is that reading difficulties should not all be treated in the same way. One child may have trouble hearing the difference between similar sounds, while another decodes fluently but lacks the vocabulary to make sense of the text. A single programme applied to the whole class is unlikely to meet the needs of both. The researchers therefore recommend identifying the particular weakness of each struggling student and targeting support accordingly. This is sensible advice, although putting it into practice is likely to demand more time and training than many schools currently have. Even so, the cost of getting the diagnosis wrong, measured in years of frustration for the child, is surely greater.
GFamilies, too, have a part to play. According to the researchers, strengthening foundational skills at home, even in simple ways, can make a difference, and schools, parents and communities should work together. Everyday activities such as conversation and shared reading would seem an obvious way to build the knowledge on which comprehension depends. Reading aloud to a child, for example, introduces words and ideas that rarely come up in ordinary conversation. None of this makes reading problems trivial, but it does replace a discouraging message with a more hopeful one. Children who find reading hard are not held back by a fixed lack of ability; in many cases, they are missing specific skills that can be developed with the right support.