How Dogs Can Help Teach Children to Read

A "PAWS That Empower" Workshop (Courtesy: MobilityDog.org)

Dogs continuously amaze us with their talents. They can be invaluable service animals, effective hunting companions, remarkable disease detectives and just great all-around pets. But did you know that they can also help teach children to read?

Literacy Crisis

Literacy has significant consequences not only for individual learning and pleasure but also for global health and economic success. By one estimate, nearly 800 million people worldwide (about 15 percent of the population) cannot read. At the country level, poor literacy skills have been linked with diminished health outcomes and slow economic growth. Individually, the inability to read fluently reduces self-esteem and social participation and increases job accidents and absenteeism.

In the last decade, children’s reported enjoyment of reading, and therefore the frequency with which kids read, has declined. Blame your favorite bugaboo: video games, social media, the general chaos of modern life. Whatever the causes, we’re facing a problem that leads to the obvious question: how can we improve students’ motivation to read for pleasure and thereby increase the frequency of efforts that can improve their reading skills? One answer: have children read to dogs.

Smiling Dog, Kevin (Courtesy: MobilityDog.org)

How Dogs Fit In

Below-average readers often fall behind because of reading anxiety. Asked to read in front of their peers, they fear failure and worry about the criticism they may receive from other students (and perhaps from the teacher as well). This stress leads to poor performance, increasing tension in a vicious circle. How, therefore, can we create a situation in which students can practice their reading with less fear of embarrassment and disapproval?

Enter the dog. We know interacting with dogs can reduce stress. Research has shown that, by extension, the silent companionship of a dog as a reading partner can allow a child to work through a reading assignment at a comfortable pace without fear of being judged.

Why Does It Work?

Many studies have examined the effects of having students read aloud to a dog. The non-judgmental presence of a canine reading partner may allow children to work at their own pace without fear of being harshly evaluated. Less anxiety, in turn, leads to increased motivation to practice reading, which produces skill improvement. The cascade of positive effects continues as improved skills increase confidence, followed by higher enjoyment and more reading time.

One possible driver of these outcomes is what scientists refer to as biophilia, the human inclination to pay special attention to living systems, including those featuring animals. Evidence of this hypothesis comes from research in adults, which has found that adults show faster identification of visual changes to scenes that contain animals or humans than those that contain inanimate objects. Studies with children have shown that kids prefer to interact with animals rather than toys.

Results

It remains difficult to develop objective measures of things like reading comfort and skill. Nevertheless, researchers have applied various methods to determine the degree to which canine companionship while reading improves student performance.

Beautiful Labrador Service Dog (Courtesy: MobilityDog.org)

The following benefits have been identified: 

• Improved fluency and reading comprehension, as reported by teachers.

• Enhanced student ability to explore, analyze, and summarize topics and themes and to predict the narrative flow of reading material. 

• Significant increases in reading skills measured by accepted literacy and oral reading ability assessments. 

• Reduced blood pressure of children reading to a dog.

Although hard objective evidence remains to be developed, researchers have concluded that “there is clear documentation that reading to a dog has the potential to bring significant improvements to children’s reading abilities, and therefore deserves further investigation.” Particularly when considering the global costs of illiteracy, read-to-a-dog programs seem to represent an effective and relatively inexpensive strategy for improving childhood enjoyment of, and involvement in, all forms of reading.