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Building the necessary links to the home environment is essential
because, without support at home, young learners are less likely to engage

with ER. This in turn can lead to a lack of progress in reading, with weaker
readers soon falling behind – the so-called ‘Matthew effect’, whereby the

strong get stronger and the weak get weaker very quickly. As children

become weaker in relation to their peers, they read even less, and this
quickly leads to big differences in reading ability.

Here are some useful tips to help parents of pre-school children
make the most of reading time outside the classroom.

4. The importance of success

In contexts where English is the medium of instruction, such as
where Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is practised, any

lack of achievement in reading can have very significant consequences,

particularly when learners reach the stage of reading in order to learn about
other subjects. At this point, a lack of basic reading skills begins to impact

upon the learning of other subjects and that will hold back progress across

the curriculum as a whole. With this in mind, it is clearly essential that
teachers monitor the progress of young readers so that support can be given

immediately, should they start to fall behind.

f. Reading skills
Reading is the reader’s struggle to understand what the text is about. In other

words, it is a dialogue between the text and the reader (Hedge, 2000). Reading

serves specific purposes (Grabe and Stoller, 2002, p.6). For example:
1. Reading to find specific information. This is called scanning. Readers try to

find out about a specific word or piece of information.
2. Reading to skim the text. This is done to get a general understanding of the

text.
3. Reading to learn from texts. It occurs in an academic context where the

reader has to memorize information and details.

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