ABSTRACT
In 2005 I w as invited to tak e part in a conference focused on the benef ts of reading aloud to children in the early years. During the course of this tw o day event – an event that actually had the impressive title of ‘Summit’ – the audience was presented with data taken from a wide range of research studies all of which demonstrated fairly convincingly the important point that kids who are read aloud to more than three times a week (from 4 months till age 3) were signif cantly more likely to develop high levels of literacy than those who were not. Not surprisingly, these same studies also demonstrated that the kids who were regularly read aloud to, and those who were not, were dif ferentiated around the usual kinds of lines: kids in poorer, isolated families, indigenous children and folk who have a language background other than English were substantially less likely to prioritise (or even to attempt) reading aloud with their children.
