Language learning through reading for families

What does research say about reading with your children?

The best-known result comes from a 1995 meta-analysis by Adriana Bus, Marinus van IJzendoorn and Anthony Pellegrini, which pooled studies of how often parents read books with pre-school children. Reading was related to language growth, early literacy and later reading achievement, with an overall effect of d = 0.59, about 8% of the variance in the outcomes they measured. The link didn't depend on the family's socioeconomic status. The authors also noted that the effect seemed to shrink once children could read on their own.

How you read matters too. In dialogic reading the adult asks questions and lets the child do more of the telling, instead of reading straight through. Suzanne Mol and colleagues pooled 16 studies in 2008 and found it added to children's expressive vocabulary (d = 0.59 across 9 studies), but the gain was much smaller for four- and five-year-olds and for children at risk of language difficulties.

For second languages specifically, Lisa Fitton and colleagues analysed 54 US studies of shared book reading with young children learning English and found a significant positive effect on their English language and literacy.

That last caveat matters. The PISA figures are correlations, and none of these studies tested parents and teenagers learning a new language side by side. What carries over is the pattern: regular, shared and talked about.

What is a family language policy, and does it matter?

Researchers use family language policy for the planning a family does, openly or not, about which languages are used at home and by whom. Kendall King, Lyn Fogle and Aubrey Logan-Terry, who mapped the field in 2008, argue that these choices shape children's language development, their success at school and whether minority languages survive.

The best-known policy is one parent, one language. Annick De Houwer tested it with questionnaires from 1,899 families in Flanders where at least one parent spoke a language other than Dutch, each with a child aged 6 to 10. Every child spoke Dutch, but not every child used the family's other language. The families most likely to succeed were those where both parents spoke the minority language and at most one also spoke Dutch at home. One parent, one language turned out to be neither necessary nor sufficient.

The lesson for any family, including one learning a language nobody grew up with, is that the amount of the language in the house counts for more than the rule behind it. A fixed weekly story everyone reads does more than a policy nobody keeps. If your family has a home language your children understand but can't read, our page on heritage learners covers that case, and the myths page explains why two languages don't confuse children.

Is Contos suitable for children?

Not young children, and we'd rather say so plainly. Contos is a library of serialized fiction written for teenagers and adults. The stories are warm, everyday and apolitical; the crime is cosy (thefts, forgeries, family secrets) and nothing gruesome happens. But the subjects are grown-up ones: inheritances, office romances, dating apps, debts and family rivalries, and some series open just after a death in the family. Even the A1 stories are about adult lives, because adult beginners need easy language, not childish plots.

If your teenager is reading, read a chapter or two yourself first, as you would with any book, and decide whether the themes suit them.

How can a parent and a teenager read the same story?

In Italian, as in every language in our reading report, the flagship series is written separately at each level from A1 to B2. The characters and the plot are the same; the language is not. Here is Marco arriving home at his grandmother's guesthouse on the Ligurian coast, at A1 and at A2:

So a teenager at A1 and a parent at A2 can read the same chapter on the same evening and talk about it afterwards in the language you share at home. That talk is the part the research keeps pointing to: in PISA 2009, students whose parents regularly talked with them about books, films or social issues tended to read better. A few things help:

• Be a fellow learner, not the examiner. In a 2025 survey of 400 parents in Bangkok, most were willing to learn English alongside their children, but many lacked confidence as role models, and 81.75% reported limited English of their own. Reading at your own level removes the need to be the expert.
• Let the teenager steer. Yuko Goto Butler's study of parents and children learning English in China found parents who kept a controlling style as their children grew older did less to build the children's own motivation than parents who adjusted to their changing needs.
• Adapt the habit to your family. Forey, Besser and Sampson found Hong Kong parents supported their children's English in many ways but rarely read aloud, a habit they describe as culturally specific. Reading side by side and talking afterwards is one option, not the only one.
• Stop at the cliffhanger. Every chapter ends on one, which gives the family something to argue about until tomorrow. Our page on motivation explains why that pull matters.

Each reader needs their own Contos account, because levels and flashcards follow the person. Contos moves each reader up by vocabulary: A2 at 500 known words, B1 at 1,500 and B2 at 4,000. To choose starting levels, see how to choose your level.