Practice, Practice, Practice

From What Reading Does For The Mind by Anne E. Cunningham and Keith E. Stanovich

Reading has cognitive consequences that extend beyond its immediate task of lifting meaning from a particular passage. Furthermore, these consequences are reciprocal and exponential in nature. Accumulated over time—spiraling either upward or downward—they carry profound implications for the development of a wide range of cognitive capabilities. Concern about the reciprocal influences of reading achievement has been elucidated through discussions of so-called “Matthew effects” in academic achievement (Stanovich, 1986; Walberg & Tsai, 1983). The term “Matthew effects” is taken from the Biblical passage that describes a rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer phenomenon. Applying this concept to reading, we see that very early in the reading process poor readers, who experience greater difficulty in breaking the spelling-to-sound code, begin to be exposed to much less text than their more skilled peers (Allington, 1984; Biemiller, 1977–1978). Further exacerbating the problem is the fact that less-skilled readers often find themselves in materials that are too difficult for them (Allington, 1977, 1983, 1984; Gambrell, Wilson, & Gantt, 1981). The combination of deficient decoding skills, lack of practice, and difficult materials results in unrewarding early reading experiences that lead to less involvement in reading-related activities. Lack of exposure and practice on the part of the lessskilled reader delays the development of automaticity and speed at the word recognition level. Slow, capacity-draining word recognition processes require cognitive resources that should be allocated to comprehension. Thus, reading for meaning is hindered; unrewarding reading experiences multiply; and practice is avoided or merely tolerated without real cognitive involvement.

The disparity in the reading experiences of children of varying skill may have many other consequences for their future reading and cognitive development. As skill develops and word recognition becomes less resource demanding and more automatic, more general language skills, such as vocabulary, background knowledge, familiarity with complex syntactic structures, etc., become the limiting factor on reading ability (Chall, 1983; Sticht, 1979). But the sheer volume of reading done by the better reader has the potential to provide an advantage even here if—as our research suggests—reading a lot serves to develop these very skills and knowledge bases (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997; Echols, West, Stanovich, & Zehr, 1996; Stanovich & Cunningham, 1992, 1993). From the standpoint of a reciprocal model of reading development, this means that many cognitive differences observed between readers of differing skill may in fact be consequences of differential practice that itself resulted from early differences in the speed of initial reading acquisition. The increased reading experiences of children who master the spelling-to-sound code early thus might have important positive feedback effects that are denied the slowly progressing reader. In our research, we have begun to explore these reciprocal effects by examining the role that reading volume plays in shaping the mind and will share many of our findings in this article.