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March 07, 2025
Just 34.6% of children in the UK read for pleasure, according to a 2024 survey by the National Literacy Trust. This is the lowest number since the annual survey began in 2005 – down from 43.4% in the previous year.
These figures are worrying, but a key to helping children learn to love reading could lie in the reading habits of multilingual children.
My own research with the National Literacy Trust, conducted in 2021, explored the reading habits of 10,000 multilingual children in the UK. These are children who speak at least one language other than English at home.
We found that not only do multilingual children spend more time reading for pleasure than those growing up speaking just one language, they also read a wider variety of texts and formats, and they enjoy reading for pleasure more.
In a separate study, published in 2021, I found that multilingual children have a multitude of connections to their reading. A book might be important because it paved the way to a new hobby or because it was the first book they read in a new language, or one that was received from a beloved relative.
The research showed that multilingual children have a wide variety of ways in thinking about “importance” in reading, including what the book represents to them, in terms of their migration journey, the people in their lives, and the languages they read in.
Understanding these connections helps us to understand what children and young people are reading for. It teases out where and how reading had an impact on a child’s life: as an escape, as a guide to a new experience, as a link to a friend.
The study also showed that parents continue to have a significant input into the reading lives of multilingual children. Because they often have a vested interest in supporting the development of the home or heritage language development, they stay involved, by reading together with children, or being on hand to help with language-related stumbling blocks.
As a result, multilingual children persevere with their reading: they read while listening to the audio book at the same time, to improve literacy skills, or they read a book in both their languages, to make sure they catch nuances and meaning. Children identify these successes as “important” parts of their reading journey.
But in my research with the National Literacy Trust, multilingual children told us that they wished schools paid more attention to their multilingualism. While conducting focus groups about multilingual reading in schools a few years ago, I noticed that children would only talk to me about their reading in English. When I queried this, one girl said: “Sure, I read all the Harry Potter books in Bengali. But why do you want to know about that? Nobody wants to know about that.”
In working to address this problem, I have developed techniques in my research that have helped multilingual children map their reading both in and outside school, and in more than one language.
This can also help other children understand and plot their own connections to what they read, and to recognise the value in what they read that isn’t books at school.
One key method is to create a “river of reading”: a chronological artefact that charts a child’s reading journey across their various languages, and what reading is important to them. It’s suitable for all reading, multilingual or monolingual.
This activity prompts children to think about the books that were important to them when they were very small, and to ask the adults in their lives about this too. It asks them to think about what they read that isn’t in books, such as magazines, recipes and messages from friends.
And it prompts children to consider that a written text might be important to them without being their “favourite” – that reading something important isn’t always easy. This allows them to claim and discuss books they didn’t like or found difficult, too.
This year’s World Book Day has taken on board the rivers of reading activity to help schools understand the reading that goes on at home and in school.
As a bonus, activities such as this could make multilingualism more visible in a positive way in schools. This sends a message to multilingual children that all parts of their identity are welcome and can have a positive effect on motivation for language learning for all children.
