Hi Graham
Thanks for your interest in our new research (now online) which looked at the relationship between the family and home environment and a child’s attitude to reading and their reading levels.
The media coverage of the research to date has focused on the (easily digestible) finding that more children have mobile phones than books of their own. We are certainly not saying that this has a causal impact on children’s literacy, but it has helped us to raise awareness that 27% of children don’t have books of their own at home. This has sparked debate that will hopefully encourage people to think more about the impact of the home environment on a child’s literacy.
We’d like to assure you that we are not here to promote books as the only solution to literacy. All our previous research has shown that other materials are more frequently read by young people than books, including magazines, websites and text messages. We believe that good literacy means having the reading, writing, speaking and listening skills an individual needs to fulfil their potential. Increasingly these skills can be gained or used in new forms of technology.
One of the things our research looks at is the ownership of resources that can support literacy; including mobile phones, books, desks, computers, newspapers and magazines. We found that children who read above the expected level for their age are more likely to own ALL of these resources but are particularly more likely to have books of their own (80% compared with 58% of those reading below the expected level) and desks of their own (75% compared with 57%). We are not pitching any one resource against another and saying that one is better, purely reporting the relationship between having good reading skills and enjoying certain resources at home.
Our research also highlights the importance of parental encouragement of literacy. We found that children who aren’t encouraged to read by their mother are three times more likely to say ‘reading is boring’ than those who are encouraged to read a lot, and children are twice as likely to read outside of class if they are encouraged to read by their mother or father a lot. In the face of this, 2 in 10 young people don’t get any encouragement to read at all from their mother, and 3 in 10 don’t from their father. This is why we have launched our Tell Me a Story campaign to raise awareness of this issue. You can support it here –
www.literacytrust.org.uk/tellmeastory
We may well look at literacy and technology use (not just ownership) in the future. This is a topic that is of great interest to us and one that deserves exploring. Our research on writing, released at the end of last year, showed that blogs and social networking are positively linked to children’s attitudes to writing – see
http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/research/nlt_research/261_young_peoples_writing_attitudes_behaviour_and_the_role_of_technology
Dr Christina Clark
Head of Research – National Literacy Trust
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