Is your preschooler ready to learn to read? What matters most before big school?
The peer-reviewed research evidence on this is clear: oral language skills.
Big picture:
Children who start school with poorly developed language skills are at high risk of later reading difficulties. Language interventions before school can help.
Zoom out:
Preschool oral language skills have both a direct and an indirect effect on the development of later reading comprehension:
- Learning to read words depends on three main skills:
- phoneme awareness;
- letter knowledge; and
- the rapid retrieval of the names or symbols or objects (that is, RAN).
- A preschooler’s oral language skills at 3.5 years are a good predictor of phoneme awareness, letter knowledge and RAN shortly after school entry (at around 5.5 years).
- Between 5.5 and 6.5 years of age, phoneme awareness and letter knowledge predict the development of word reading.
- Word reading together with preschool oral language predicts reading comprehension at the age of 8.
The key challenge:
In the preschool years, language skills are not stable. Not every child comes to school with the oral language skills needed for reading, including many children who:
- have developmental language disorder;
- have intellectual or other neurodevelopmental disorders or disabilities;
- do not yet speak the language of instruction used at school (e.g. English); and/or
- are socially disadvantaged.
For these children, the immediate priority before primary school should be on developing oral language skills to give them a solid foundation for literacy development when they start school.
Getting help:
Evidence-based oral language therapies are effective and can help. So, too, can dialogic reading practices. Common goals include to increase a child’s vocabulary, sentence structures, and narrative listening and retelling skills.
Bottom line:
- Before school, early language skills are the foundation for the later development of both word reading and language comprehension: the two main skills that underpin later reading comprehension at school.
- Preschoolers with delayed and disordered language development and preschoolers who have yet to learn the language of instruction used at school, benefit from extra support with their language, ideally before they start big school.
Go deeper:
Margaret J. Snowling, Charles Hulme. 2025. The Reading Is Language Model: A Theoretical Framework for Language and Reading Development and Intervention. Annual Review Developmental Psychology. 7:195-218. (Open Access)
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