ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block. Reading to preschool kids is important. No surprise there. But a study in the Journal of Child Development found that how we read is important, too, and the teachers who make a small change in the way they read to their preschoolers could have big consequences down the road.
NPR's Alix Spiegel reports.
MARY-LYNN GOLDSTEIN: It's time to get your circle for rug time. It's time to get your circle for rug time.
ALIX SPIEGEL, BYLINE: It's Monday morning. It's 9:00 and, in certain parts of the world - parts of the world inhabited primarily by three-year-old preschoolers - that means just one thing.
GOLDSTEIN: It's time to get your circle for rug time.
SPIEGEL: So the three-year-olds in this Washington, D.C. preschool gather into a circle. By 9:10, all legs are crisscross applesauce, all hands officially to themselves and it is time to read. The teacher in the class, Mary-Lynn Goldstein, holds up a book and announces the title.
GOLDSTEIN: "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the"...
SPIEGEL: Then Mary-Lynn splays the pages and begins to read.
GOLDSTEIN: There's the bus driver and what does pigeon say? I thought he'd never leave.
SPIEGEL: All across the country, there are preschool teachers doing this exact same thing in almost the exact same way. They hold up a book in front of a group of preschool kids who cannot read themselves and they read the story through. Now, preschool teachers do this and they have been doing it for decades, at least in part because of a belief that this simple act of reading to children will ultimately help the children to become good readers themselves.
ANITA MCGINTY: The thought was, you read to children, that will make a big difference in how well they read later on when they're in school. That's still probably the biggest message out there - read to young children.
SPIEGEL: This is Anita McGinty, an education researcher at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education. And she says that about 15 years ago, researchers like her started to look more closely at reading. They wanted to understand which behaviors exactly helped a child to learn and, in the process, they discovered something really surprising about the simple act of sitting down and reading through a story with a child.
MCGINTY: It mattered a lot less than we maybe thought it did.
SPIEGEL: It's not that reading wasn't helpful. It helped build vocabulary, for example, but it didn't necessarily improve a child's ability to read, per se. The question was why. So, researchers did more studies, specifically eye tracking studies.
Here's Shayne Piasta, a researcher from Ohio State University.
SHAYNE PIASTA: What they would do is they'd put a child on their parent's lap and then they would use some special equipment that allows them to pinpoint exactly where the children are looking at any given moment in time.
SPIEGEL: Turned out, when you simply read a book to kids, they tend to ignore the print on the page.
PIASTA: Over 90 percent of the time, the children are focusing on the pictures on the page or they're looking up at their parent or things of that nature.
SPIEGEL: So, here, went the theory, was the answer. Reading is an incremental process. First, you become familiar with letters, then with words, with the process of reading from left to right. And then, eventually, you learn to read. But if a child's attention isn't drawn to the printed word, then reading to a child won't necessarily make them more familiar with what it means to read, which raises this question. Anita McGinty.
MCGINTY: Can you change what they're looking at or thinking about during book reading?
SPIEGEL: And so, McGinty, along with Piasta and a researcher named Laura Justice designed a study, a study that made a very modest change in the way that teachers read to preschool kids, specifically very disadvantaged preschool kids who can end up having reading issues.
Essentially, they gave two groups of preschool teachers books for an entire year.