"A child’s ability to read is reliant on nature and nurture. New research suggests even high quality reading genes aren’t enough to overcome poor schooling.
Researchers from Florida State University found top schools allow innate abilities to flourish, but poor schools can quash a child’s potential." …
“Parents” should be part of the success formula too, IMO.
Can’t agree more.
Very early reading ability and ability to read children’s book can be gained primarily on nature. But to go further, they need to be encouraged to read more, read challenging books and read good books.
Part of our brain is used to translated text into visual images and abstract ideas. If unused, the ability regresses like everything else in our brain. For example, kids who primarily read only graphic novels (cartoons, manga) for a long time find it difficult to concentrate in regular books, even when he is proficient with vocabulary and grammar needed.
Is this a surprise? Most things in learning, and life, are partially influenced by genetics/heritability and partially influenced by environmental factors.
Is there research support for this? I read manga, and most manga and light novels have story in them. There aren’t as many words as a regular novel, of course.
If the schools let them.
In the area where I live, this is not a problem for reading, but it is for elementary school math, which is taught from a new curriculum that has no textbook and uses techniques unfamiliar to the parents. Parents will see their children struggling with a concept, and they can’t help to reinforce what the teacher taught because they don’t know or understand what the teacher taught. Complaints abound.
@marian our schools ordered parents NOT to help, because we “wouldn’t know how to do it correctly.”
I have seen that some become good readers only when pushed into it. I believe that my kid started reading much faster only in medical school, when they absolutely have to read fast because of sheer volume of material. Before that, the reading / verbal scores on the standardized test were predictably the lowest in comparison to other sections, and that included the MCAT.
"In the area where I live, this is not a problem for reading, but it is for elementary school math, which is taught from a new curriculum that has no textbook and uses techniques unfamiliar to the parents. Parents will see their children struggling with a concept, and they can’t help to reinforce what the teacher taught because they don’t know or understand what the teacher taught. " - it is not possible that an adult cannot help a kid with the elementary school math. Yes, we may have forgotten, but you can Google absolutely anything these days. I use Google for my work all the time. If you can find very detailed technical help for complicated CS issues, believe me, you will find the solutions for the elementary math, middle school math, HS math, college math…etc, and we have been able to provide help, including few questions in college.
As the parent of very early readers I think nature played About 90 percent of it. The other 10 percent was I think the fact that we watch tv with the close captioning on. My daughter’s first grade teacher was astounded when on a bus field trip my daughter looked at a sign and correctly pronouved the town they were near: Bourbannais ( bur-Bon-ay). Yeah we watch a lot of local weather reports and Bourbannias always seems to be in the path of some storm so it gets mentioned a lot. The teacher kept saying how we must create a literature rich environment. Uh huh. Sure. That’s it. Lol.
But actually I was more impressed that the kid could easily switch between English decoding and sight reading familiar but non phonetic words.
“child’s reading ability” - what do we mean here, the ability to read a lot fast, e.g., a novel a day with bookshelves of novels, or read critically, e.g., able to progress steadily with difficulty of the materials read?
That’s not exactly the issue, @MiamiDAP.
The students are taught to do math using techniques unfamiliar to the parents. For example, they are taught to set up and solve long division problems in a way that you and I wouldn’t recognize. If the student is confused, the parent can’t help, and it’s not a matter of forgetting. It’s a matter of the parent not having learned the new approach in the first place. And the student must show the work he/she used to solve the problem, using the new approach, to get credit for solving the problem. So the parent can’t simply teach the child the traditional method and expect that everything will be OK.
If there was a textbook, there would not be a problem. Parents could familiarize themselves with the new approaches using the textbook. But there is none, and Dr. Google isn’t much help.
Marian,
I say, Google it, you may be very surprised! Did you try?
Genetics definitely played a factor, but my son went to a very small, rural school where many students without additional support struggled with grade level knowledge through their entire school careers, so good schooling definitely wasn’t key for him.
What was key was that beginning when he was 3 years old, I pulled out my old kindergarten level books and started teaching him. Whenever I bought him an educational software program, I bought a grade level ahead of where he was, so it would challenge him and he could grow into it. By the time he was in kindergarten and reading on his own, I refused to read any books that he was able to read himself, so we took turns, him reading me beginning chapter books and me reading him much more advanced books (including the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy prior to the release of the movies (and those aren’t easy read aloud books).
Maybe the school wasn’t happy that he was reading about 4 grades ahead of his grade level through elementary school, but he’s their responsibility for 12-13 years, he’s my responsibility for his entire life, so I’m always going to err on the side of doing the best for my child and not doing what the school wants.
We also used to play math games - in the grocery store we started by counting all the items in the cart, that advanced to keeping track of the cost of everything. On sick days and snow days we’d play ‘store’ and I’d make him compute the correct change and then would make it more challenging by saying now don’t use any quarters or don’t use any dimes.
The only time the school really said anything was when he was in 1st or 2nd grade and he had a problem like 7 - 9 and he was supposed to say that it couldn’t be done, but instead he wrote -2. The teacher told him that wasn’t the right answer. That annoyed me because maybe it’s not the answer that he was supposed to give, but to tell a student that it isn’t the ‘right’ answer is just not correct.
And I haven’t yet seen a method for elementary school math that I couldn’t figure out and teach myself within a day or two.
@MiamiDAP, I don’t have kids that age anymore. I’m reporting what I hear from my colleagues at work who have elementary-age children and are very frustrated. The Internet does not seem to have been of much help to them, but perhaps if they dug deeper, they might be able to find some curriculum materials on various ways of teaching math techniques and see if any of them look familiar to their children. It would be easy to make a mistake, though, and accidentally teach a child the wrong procedure.
“kids who primarily read only graphic novels (cartoons, manga) for a long time find it difficult to concentrate in regular books, even when he is proficient with vocabulary and grammar needed.”
I’m going to disagree on this as well. H grew up in a low-income family with parents who both worked two or even three jobs so that they weren’t able to offer the kind of support more affluent families might have. But his much older brother loved comic books, and H, who had taught himself to read, read those comics like his life depended on them. Maybe it did, actually. Once he got to school he was able to take regular books out of the school library. But you know what? He STILL read comic books, and collected them as a teen, young adult and even as a working professional.
Starting off reading comic books did not hamper him in any way. In fact, he majored in communications, has an extensive library of books in many genres, and is a prolific reader…who still reads comic books. Sports columns too.
I’ve never heard of people having trouble “concentrating” on regular books if they read comics. Ever.
I read a lot of manga and graphic novels when I was younger and through high school. I now routinely read 200-300 pages per day without much of an issue. I’d love to see evidence of that statement.
Of course reading is a mix of genetics and environmental factors. I was reading chapter books by kindergarten because my parents read to me constantly and I was fairly bright.
My K-8 was middle of the pack in terms of school quality. The biggest problem they had is that they had no idea what to do with me. I blew through the SRA things (are those still even used?) and they kept giving me the ones for the grades above me. I finished through 4th grade when I was in 1st and they then just let me read my own books during SRA time.
My half-sister and I (4.5 years apart) were basically on the same reading level by the time I was in ~2nd grade. None of our parents went to college but they are intelligent. She was mostly raised by her mom though and I can guarantee that her mom never read to her. But, she’s been an avid reader since as long as I can remember. Even now at 30, she always has a book or two going.
I’m honestly not sure what this study is trying to say or what new information it’s uncovered.
My son was reading on a tenth grade level in first grade. We were thrilled, but you never know, since he was the one to develop schizophrenia. Genetics probably played a key role in his reading and his illness.
Perhaps a justification for the old idea that reading children bedtime stories is important to their development.
“kids who primarily read only graphic novels (cartoons, manga) for a long time find it difficult to concentrate in regular books, even when he is proficient with vocabulary and grammar needed.”
I am also going to disagree with this. My daughter, who is 15, reads quite a bit of manga. She has no trouble concentrating on higher level reading. She actually read a college psychology textbook over the summer when she was 11. Not sure if this was a good idea, as she was constantly analyzing herself and me! 
She bounces back and forth between manga, fiction and non-fiction. The other week, she was reading a non-fiction book about Louis XIV so that she would be inspired to learn more French this summer.
The key to getting better isn’t really doing things the “right way” but making an effort in the first place. If graphic novels or children’s books or even texting gets you to actually read, that’s real progress.
Interest in novels and larger works often comes later.
Harmful effect of primarily reading comics was my personal speculation from this theory;
It’s also not as black and white as EITHER nature/nurture. I have three kids. All of them are bright. The oldest was a late reader. It didn’t really “click” for him until well into first grade, but he caught up quickly. OTOH, he seemed to have sprung from the womb doing math problems. My next one sat down with a book when she was 3 and demanded that I teach her to read. But subtraction made her cry when she came to it in school. My youngest pretty much taught herself to read, and was fine with math until a teacher told her she was “bad” at it for not knowing what manipulatives where. But that is a different story.
Bottom line-I read to all three kids in the same way and did a lot of home “preschooling” with all of them. They still all learned differently with different timelines.