Once students are reading, quantity of reading becomes increasingly important in terms of reading development. However, there is very little information on how much reading is sufficient.
Wang et al. (2025) investigated this issue in their study. Below is a brief overview of their key points.
Background
- Learning new words requires repeated exposure in understandable contexts.
- Extended book reading provides an effective medium for this to occur. Most words appear multiple times in a book, providing the reader with multiple opportunities to encounter them in multiple contexts.
- Previous research shows a strong, positive correlation between increased print exposure and better reading achievement.
- The better a reader the greater the amount of text read.
- Vocabulary is one of the strongest predictors of reading comprehension.
- Most vocabulary is learned from context, most commonly from reading – this is especially true for typically developing readers.
- When students encounter an unfamiliar word during reading, they engage in phonological decoding to establish sound-spelling correspondence and infer the meaning from context. Once an association between the sound, spelling and meaning of the word is established, it attains lexical quality in the reader’s mental lexicon.
- However, previous research does not provide a quantifiable target indicating the amount of reading children should engage in.
Research
- The researchers analysed 45 children’s books ranging in length between 15,072 and 183,874 words with the lexical level ranging from grade 3 to 10.
- The 45 books consisted of 28,886 unique words ranging from 1980 to 8312 per book.
- The greatest number of unique words (>99%) were nouns, adjective, verbs, adverbs and proper nouns.
- The number of unfamiliar words, for typically developing readers, decreased as students moved up the grades. For example, a typical grade 3 student would encounter approximately 2,798 unfamiliar unique words in an age-appropriate book, while a grade 6 student would encounter approximately 1,157 words in an age-appropriate book and this decreases further for grade 9 students.
- The researchers calculated the number of words students would be expected to learn from reading one book. For an average 6th grader it was 283 words.
- They then estimated the expected number of words learned as a function of the number of books read. This information was then used to calculate the number of books a student would be required to read to meet the target of learning 2,000 new words each year for students in grades 6 to 8. It was found that a 6th grader who had a typical incidental word learning rate would need to read 7 of the 45 books analysed in the study.
Discussion/Implications
- Three factors influence word learning during book reading – the relative challenge level of the book, the individual’s incidental word learning rate and the amount of reading.
- For developing readers, books with more unfamiliar words provide more opportunities for exposure to new words, but this is likely to be associated with decreased comprehension. In fact, the research shows that when 2-5% of the text is unfamiliar comprehension is impaired.
- Conversely, books that contain no new vocabulary may be easier to comprehend but won’t contribute to vocabulary growth. However, if children are not provided with books with some level of challenge, the number of new words they will learn is limited.
- Incidental word learning increases when students understand the text (i.e., they have the background knowledge to make sense of what they are reading).
- Incidental word learning can be increased by explicitly teaching reading strategies which focus on word parts (i.e. instruction in morphology) and effective use of context clues.
- It is also necessary to consider the amount of print exposure in a book. Full length books provide multiple exposures to words due to continuity in content, theme, setting and the author’s use of language. The more exposures to a word, the more likely it is that the word will be remembered.
- When reading a fiction book, you develop a mental model of the characters and their relationship to the events which facilitates understanding of unfamiliar words.
- The researchers estimated that a sixth grader should read for 17 minutes every day to achieve an annual vocabulary growth of around 2,000 words. Obviously, if you are a slower or struggling reader you would need to read for a longer period to achieve the same outcome.
My Thoughts
- It can be daunting to expect struggling readers to independently read for 17 minutes , especially if the text they are reading meets the requirement of being somewhat challenging so they are being exposed to new vocabulary.
- For these students (and beginning readers), I would recommend a three part strategy in which students read a page to an adult who provides feedback for any unknown words, students continue reading independently (begin with 5 minutes and gradually increase to 10-15 minutes) and finish with the adult reading out loud to the end of the chapter and, if it is an entry level chapter book with a minimal number of pages in each chapter, read the next chapter as well.
- For a more in depth discussion of this strategy go to: Five Steps for Encouraging Reluctant Readers to Read
- Also check out Nurturing a Love of Reading
Reference
Wang, Z., O’Reilly, T., Flor, M., Klebanov, B., & Bruce, K. (2025). How much should I read? An analysis of word reading opportunities in children’s novels. Reading Research Quarterly