Research School Network: Books as rocket fuel Matthew Courtney explores how we can use children’s literature to develop language

As the Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) Literacy Guidance Reports for both Early Years and Key Stage 1 remind us, ​‘languages provides the foundation of thinking and should be prioritised’.

The first recommendation of all three EEF Guidance Reports for primary-aged children, focuses on developing children’s language capabilities.

Within these reports, both explicit and implicit approaches that teachers can use to support children’s language development are described. Several of these strategies recommended involve using books, and with good reason.

What is so special about books?

Research from Prof. Kate Nation and colleagues has demonstrated that listening to language within children’s books ​‘provides exposure to vocabulary that is quantitatively and qualitatively different from that experienced via day-to-day conversation’ (Nation, Dawson & Hsiao, 2023, p. 375).

This finding is supported by preliminary data from the Children and Young People’s Books Lexicon, a large-scale lexical database of books read by children in the UK.

Analysis of this dataset indicates that the majority of words within texts aimed at 7 – 9 year olds and 10 – 12 year olds are not used within the spoken language on CBBC television programmes aimed at children of the same age (Korochkina, Marelli, Brysbaert, & Rastle, 2023).

In other words, as the DfE’s Reading Framework highlights, ​‘through stories, children encounter vocabulary that they are unlikely to hear in everyday conversation but will come across in writing’ (DfE, 2021, p. 35).

We know that the languages and sentence structures used within books are often more sophisticated and more abstract than those used in spoken language (Nation, et al., 2023) and that the vocabulary used is often more morphologically complex (Korochkina, et al., 2023).

This explains why researchers have referred to books as ​‘rocket fuel for language development’. They provide an opportunity to explore words that children may not otherwise be exposed to.

What is the best way to use this ​‘rocket fuel’?

1. Reading aloud to pupils

By reading aloud high-quality texts to children, we expose them to rich language and enable them to engage in and with more complex texts than they would be able to decode independently.

To fully leverage the benefits of the rich language within texts, we need to read aloud to children in a range of subject disciplines and from a variety of different genres including, but not limited to, non-fiction, poetry, digital texts, graphic novels, picture fiction and more.

This variation provides ​‘an opportunity to explicitly teach the features and structures of different types of texts, which can develop more advanced comprehension and reasoning skills’ (EEF, 2021, p. 15).

Although there are intrinsic benefits to reading aloud to children, including modelling fluent reading and supporting the development of a rich reading culture, when considering language development simply reading aloud to pupils can be described as a more passive approach.

The KS2 Guidance Report from EEF highlights that, following on from exposure to rich vocabulary within a text, children need a ​‘breadth of opportunities to hear, embed and use new language’ (2021, p. 15). There may also be times where explicitly teaching vocabulary before children encounter this within the text will be beneficial.

2. Interactive reading

The EEF’s Early Years Evidence Store describes interactive reading as involving ​‘an adult offering a prompt to encourage interactions between the adult reader and child(ren)’.

The adult will encourage the child to respond. They might ask an open-ended question, direct the child’s attention to an interesting illustration or encourage them to finish a sentence. 

The adult is using the book to encourage the child to engage in those crucial back-and-forth interactions, which we know make a huge difference to our youngest children’s language development.

In the Early Years, interactive reading and reading aloud will form one part of settings wider Communication and Language provision, which will provide lots of opportunities for talk and back-and-forth interactions. 

3. Developing a rich reading culture

Analysis of nationally representative data indicates that a positive attitude towards reading is associated with more extensive vocabulary knowledge, confirming the researchers’ hypothesis that ​‘books directly expose readers to new words, and therefore reading should influence vocabulary directly’ (Sullivan & Brown, 2015, p. 985).

By fostering an environment where children can read and, crucially, choose to read of their own volition we are enabling children to immerse themselves in the rich language within the world of books.

Developing a Reading for Pleasure culture in your school will have positive consequences for literacy more broadly as well as many other areas, as identified in the DfE’s research evidence summary in this area (DfE, 2012).

4. Using poetry and nursery rhymes

The unique and rich language found in poems and nursery rhymes provide a lot to explore and discuss, while helping to ​‘build children’s strong emotional connection to language’ (DfE, 2023, p. 29).

Supporting children in Early Years to develop a rich repertoire of known nursery rhymes and poems can have far reaching consequences for their wider literacy development, as research indicates that children’s nursery rhyme experiences are related to later phonological and print-related skills, including emergent reading (Dunst, Meter & Hanby, 2011).


Join us at our Evidence Overview: Primary Literacy webinar to find out more about language development and evidence-informed literacy provision. This free session is taking place on Monday 20 November.