Attention (3): the power of reading aloud
This post in a series on Attention in the modern world, and in our schools, looks at another recent book on the intersections between reading and cognition.
One of the deepest pleasures in life: being a child snuggled up to a parent, listening to a story. Another: being a parent holding your child, telling that story (such as Sam McBratney’s gentle series Guess How Much I Love You ). It is, simply,
the ineffable magic in the mingling of a voice, a narrative, loving attention, and physical closeness.
That sentence is from The Enchanted Hour: the miraculous power of reading aloud in the age of distraction (2019) by Meghan Cox Gurdon. Distraction is, of course, the opposite of Attention. Its origin is in the Latin verb ‘trahere’, to draw (in the sense of pulling): our minds can be drawn away or dragged or pulled away from a focus, and it is a condition that more and more people are being conscious of, even disturbed by. ‘Attention’ also has Latin origins, in the verb ‘tendere’, to stretch (towards), which also provides us with ‘tend’ (to look after) and thus, eventually, ‘tender’ (something we look after, that which is young and delicate).
It is one of the ultimate tender acts, a primal act of attention, that Meghan Cox Gurdon starts with in The Enchanted Hour. She makes a convincing and coherent case for the cognitive and social-emotional benefits that await children who are read to, whatever their class or background. She sees reading as an antidote to a world of fractured attention spans, one in which children are being increasingly deprived of what is an ancient and proven human connection. Indeed, Chapter 6 is called ‘The Power of Paying Attention - and Flying Free’, and starts with a description of a school librarian and author, Laura Amy Schlitz, telling a story to a group of 9- and 10-year olds, who are rivetted by the narration (more on story-telling later in this series):
This episode was an object lesson in the power of a good story to hold people fast. While Schlitz was reading, the boys and girls appeared to be in a state of suspended animation. They would not have realised it, but the enjoyment they got from listening was feeding a virtuous behavioural circle. If they sat still, kept quiet, and paid attention, they could enjoy the story, even as their enjoyment of the story got them used to sitting still, keeping quiet and paying attention.
By contrast, there is the now all too familiar opposite: the ways technology distracts us, pulls in different directions, drags us apart:
In our distracted age, it’s a challenge to keep anyone’s focus. Technology is training us to dart and react like hummingbirds, scrolling, clicking, tweeting, liking. For people in the sustained-attention business, not least book publishers, these developments are unsettling.
Just like Maryanne Wolf, she is particularly worried about the vulnerability of young children because they are so less cognitively capable of resisting technological distraction (not that it’s easy for adults). ‘Read-aloud families’, however, give their children a ‘triple advantage’:
They’re used to listening, so it’s easy for them to do it. They’ve heard lots of language, so their comprehension will be comparatively strong. And they know from experience that paying attention brings rewards.
There are so many other benefits that children receive from their parents when they are read to: Meghan Cox Gurdon identifies the strengthening of the bonds of love, the passing on of a wealth of knowledge and the ‘turbocharging’ of child development through picture books. She refers to a 2011 study by David Dickinson of Vanderbilt University, How Reading Books Fosters Language Development Around the World, which examined how storybooks ‘conspire to help children maintain their attention’:
An attentive adult can easily notice what a child is attending to and build on it with commentary. In turn, children are able to draw an adult’s attention to interesting pictures using a broad range of cues including gestures, sounds and words. Thus, attention can be managed by the child as well as the adult.
The Vanderbilt paper found that children at 18 months who sustain longer periods of joint attention ‘tend to possess stronger productive vocabularies at the age of 2’:
In this distracted age, we need to change our understanding of what reading aloud is, and what it can do. It is not just a simple, cozy, nostalgic pastime that can be taken up or dropped without consequence.
It is, in fact
A powerful counterweight to the pull of cultural and industrial forces that with stunning rapidity are reshaping infancy and childhood.
Probably most of us will dutifully nod along with Cox Gurdon on the importance of reading to our children, even if we are also hypocritically checking our devices in front of them (‘technoference’). She points out that it is alarmingly easy to be only half present even with the people we love most and her book is a welcome corrective to this: it reminds us of a practical, easy, free way to reconnect, to give proper attention to the people we love most.
She extends this into later life too (in families, in prisons, in nursing homes) and insists that the benefits of reading aloud never dissipate. As post-primary English teachers we have an open goal: the great opportunity to read to our pupils, however old they are. I try to read as much as possible all the way up to 18 year-olds (coming later, a post on good stories to read aloud). A story read aloud retains tremendous power even to young adults (perhaps especially so since they rarely experience this any more): teenagers can again be gripped by the tremendous pre-literate power of the human voice guiding them through a narrative.
The Enchanted Hour should be very successful. It re-focusses the attention of parents and teachers on how powerful reading aloud, and listening, can be. In our distracted age, this is something that can draw us together again. It can compel our attention.