I [Professor Law] was in a shop last weekend. A four year old boy picks up a book and says to his mum 'can I have this?' to which his mother replies 'No, because you don’t know how to read yet'. Studies have shown time and time again that many parents do not read to their children especially when they are younger, and time and time again we see that there are major inequalities between children from different backgrounds by the time they reach school.
So what difference does reading to your child make to their language development? Over the last year or so our team from Newcastle University and Queen Margaret University Edinburgh carried out a literature review funded by the UK’s Nuffield Foundation of all the best quality literature on parent/child reading to see what effect it has on children’s oral language development.
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