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Reading to Young Children in Educational Settings: A Meta‐Analysis of Recent Research
Author(s) -
Blok Henk
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/0023-8333.00091
Subject(s) - reading (process) , psychology , meta analysis , developmental psychology , linguistics , medicine , philosophy
This article reviews 10 studies, comprising 11 samples, of the effects of reading to young children in schools. The age of the children varied between 31 and 90 months. Dependent variables were classified in 2 domains: oral language and reading skills. The combined effect size for the oral language domain was d = .63, and for the reading domain d = .41. Although these figures look promising, caution is needed because the empirical evidence appears to be meager. Not only is the number of studies small, but a critical analysis of the design of the studies generally reveals poor quality.