There is something worth pausing on in a statistic that has stayed with me since I came across it. In a survey of 1,000 teachers, 28% of pupils who started reception in 2025 couldn’t turn the pages of a book; they tried to swipe or tap them instead. Whether or not that number surprises you, it points to something real: for a growing number of children, the experience of being read to at home is not a given.
This matters more than it might first appear.
Children often understand far more words than they can say or write. Receptive vocabulary, the words children can understand when they hear them, can run one to three years ahead of expressive vocabulary, and that gap can persist until around the age of 14 (Trelease, 2013). What this tells us is that pupils, particularly in the earlier secondary years, are sitting in classrooms with a significant store of latent understanding that spoken language and listening can reach, long before they can access it independently through reading.
Reading aloud is one of the most direct ways to bridge that gap.
What the research suggests
The brain does not come pre-wired for reading. Spoken language develops naturally through interaction; reading requires the brain to learn an entirely new process, decoding written symbols into sounds and meaning. Reading aloud helps build that bridge. It supports comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, and imagination, and it allows pupils to access complex ideas and texts before they have the decoding skills to reach them independently.
Research from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital found measurable neurological effects from reading aloud (Hutton et al., 2015). Children who were read to more frequently showed stronger activation in brain regions linked to language processing, mental imagery, and multisensory understanding. This is not simply a cultural or educational observation. It suggests that shared reading may physically shape how the brain develops for comprehension and narrative understanding.
One finding stands out in particular. Children with greater read-aloud experience were better at generating images in their mind’s eye; brain activity in visual processing areas indicated that they were genuinely imagining and visualising stories. For younger secondary pupils especially, who have fewer stored experiences and memories to draw upon, this matters. It means that images, explanation, and expressive reading help pupils picture people, places, and events they have never encountered directly.
Reading aloud as interpretation
Meghan Cox Gurdon describes reading aloud as something that allows people to fall into storyteller and listener relationships (Cox Gurdon, 2019). The power of it, she argues, ‘is not in the look of the thing; it’s in the telling’. Meaning is communicated not only through words, but through tone, pacing, emphasis, and emotion.
This reframes what reading aloud in a classroom actually is. It is not simply a delivery mechanism for text. It is an interpretive act. When Charles Dickens prepared his public readings, he annotated his scripts with instructions, cheerful, stern, pathos, alongside physical gestures. Fluent reading, in other words, has never been just about accurate decoding. It involves performance, interpretation, and relationship.
For teachers, this has practical implications. Expressive reading can make difficult texts more accessible. The way a sentence is read aloud can clarify what silent reading might leave ambiguous. Where a text is abstract, dense, or argumentatively complex, the teacher’s voice becomes a tool for making meaning, not just a means of getting through the material.
None of this is an argument against teaching pupils to read independently. That remains essential. But the assumption, common in secondary schools, that reading aloud is something pupils grow out of, sits awkwardly with the evidence. If fewer children are arriving at secondary school having been read to regularly at home, then the classroom may be the only place where some of them experience what it sounds like when a skilled reader brings a text to life. That is not a peripheral concern. It is a reason to take reading aloud seriously, and to do it well.
References
Cox Gurdon, M. (2019). The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction. London: Piatkus.
Hutton, J.S., Horowitz-Kraus, T., Mendelsohn, A.L., DeWitt, T. and Holland, S.K. (2015). Home Reading Environment and Brain Activation in Preschool Children Listening to Stories. Pediatrics, 136(3), pp.466–478. Available at: https://reachoutandread.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Hutton_2015_Reading-Environment-and-Brain-Activation-in-Preschool-Children-Listening-to-Stories.pdf [Accessed 17 June 2026].
Kindred Squared (2026). School Readiness Survey 2025. Available at: https://kindredsquared.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/School-Readiness-Survey-January-2026-Kindred-Squared.pdf [Accessed 17 June 2026].
Trelease, J. (2013). The Read-Aloud Handbook. 7th ed. New York: Penguin Books.
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