What does the research say?
If children are read to at least 30 minutes every night, they will go into kindergarten with about 1,000 hours of exposure to literature (Adams, 1990, as cited in Rashid et al., 2005, p. 2).
Shared book reading between a parent and child has also been shown to support language development and foster emergent literacy skills (Senechal & LeFevre, 2002, p. 455).
When children receive guided assistance from their parents when learning how to read, they are able to learn a more extensive vocabulary and learn various information processing strategies (Leseman & de Jong, 1998 as cited in Rashid et al., 2005, p. 2).
When comparing the achievement of children who were read to by a parent in English and other children who were read to in their parent’s native language, there was no significant difference in the amount of literary gains made between the two groups of children (Walters and Gunderson, 1985, as cited in Wessels, 2014, p. 149).