Reading development requires skills such as letter recognition, summarization, and inference, vocabulary, and interest and motivation to read. The vocabulary gap can grow larger and larger in relation to the amount of reading, and the Matthew effect explains this gap. However, the reading factors interact, and reading interest and motivation, educational environment, and social support also play a role.
Reading requires reading skills such as decoding, summarizing, and making inferences; vocabulary; and reading interest and motivation. In order to develop literacy skills, students need to have all of these elements in place. These elements interact and have a major impact on a reader’s overall reading ability.
Among the reading components, studies on vocabulary development have reported a growing vocabulary gap between students with higher vocabularies and those with lower vocabularies as students progress through the grades. This gap is related to the amount of reading: a strong vocabulary leads to more and more reading, and the more you read, the more opportunities you have to pick up vocabulary from the text, which in turn increases your vocabulary. Conversely, if you have a poor vocabulary, you read less and have fewer opportunities to acquire vocabulary, leaving you with a relatively poor vocabulary, which requires a lot of effort to overcome the gap later on.
This is sometimes referred to as the Matthew effect, as readers who are well-equipped to read become better and better readers, and the gap between them and those who are not becomes larger and larger. The Matthew effect refers to the phenomenon that the more social prestige or material assets a person has, the more they have of them, and the greater the gap between them and those who do not. It’s mostly used in sociology, but it also applies to reading.
The concept of the Matthew effect has important implications for reading instruction. For example, it suggests that educators should pay particular attention to students’ early vocabulary development. Educational programs should strive to increase students’ vocabulary through a variety of reading materials and activities, because if students don’t build their vocabulary early enough, the learning gap can widen over time.
However, there are problems with explaining literacy skills solely through the Matthew effect. First of all, the Matthew effect is not always present in factors related to reading. Cognitive and emotional development varies from individual to individual, and even within individuals, the rate of development varies at different times. For example, reading interest and motivation may develop on an upward curve in early childhood and then drop off at some point. Also, reading factors can influence each other to produce different results than the Matthew effect. For example, even if a reader has low reading skills, if he or she has high reading interest or motivation, this can drive the development of reading skills.
The educational environment and social support also play an important role. If students have access to a variety of reading materials and are provided with an environment that fosters positive experiences with reading, they will benefit greatly from the development of reading skills. This highlights the need for a more comprehensive and systematic approach to reading education across the education system.
Nonetheless, research explaining reading as a Matthew effect has led to a shift away from viewing literacy as simply a function of differences in intelligence and toward recognizing that reading factors are important drivers of literacy. This has led educators and parents to recognize that a multifaceted approach is needed to improve students’ reading skills, and it plays an important role in helping students gain confidence in reading.
Therefore, it is important to recognize that vocabulary, interest and motivation to read, and appropriate instructional environments and support are all important factors in the development of reading skills, and should be developed in a balanced way. This will allow students to discover the joy of reading and further expand their vocabulary through continued reading.
