49 studies agree: reading a lot makes you better at it

Any single study can be a fluke. So in 2016 two researchers gathered every study they could find of extensive reading in a second or foreign language, 49 of them, published and unpublished, from 1980 to 2014, with 71 samples of learners from children to adults, and pooled the results. That is a meta-analysis, and it is Jeon and Day (2016).

Extensive reading means reading a lot of easy, interesting material in the language, as opposed to picking apart one hard text. The question was whether people who did it got better at reading the language. They did, consistently, across countries and ages, with what the authors call a medium-sized effect.

The numbers, for the reader who wants them: an effect size summarizes how big a difference is. Studies that compared an extensive-reading group with a control group averaged about 0.57.

Studies that compared the same learners before and after averaged about 0.79, which is the weaker kind of evidence, since it cannot separate the reading from everything else that happened in the meantime. Effects were larger for adults than for children, for longer programs, and when reading was added to a course rather than replacing it.

The caveats are real and the authors give them: the studies vary in quality, most are on English, and the outcome measured is reading. This is not evidence about speaking, and nobody was tested on whether they had a good time.

But it is the closest thing this field has to a settled result. If you read a lot in a language, at a level you can handle, you get better at reading it. Every time it is measured.

The reason more people do not is that reading a lot in a language you are learning is slow and frustrating, and that is a fixable problem. Aloglot is my attempt to fix it: books at every level in 93 languages, read aloud with the words lit, the English under every sentence, and any word explained on a tap, so the "a lot" is actually possible.

Sources

• Jeon and Day (2016). The effectiveness of ER on reading proficiency: A meta-analysis. Reading in a Foreign Language, 28(2), 246–265.