It is a commonplace of our educational wisdom that young children should be read to. Not only is this belief widely held in popular thought but within the professional educational community as well (Teale, 1984). Yet it is not sufficient to say that reading to children is a key to literacy. As research (e.g., Heath, 1982, 1983; Wells, 1982, 1985) has shown, not all children who are “read to” at home do well in early literacy instruction.

Critical to the experience of adult–child book reading is the nature of that activity. In her ethnographic study of children from three communities, Heath (1982) found, for example, that when adults looked at books with very young children, all engaged in the kind of pointing-and-naming games, which Ninio and Bruner (1978) referred to as “ritual naming.” However, once children's vocabulary needs diminished, some parents demanded an end to verbal interaction during book reading – children were expected to “be quiet and listen” – while other parents allowed the verbal interaction to remain a part of the activity. In a similar kind of contrastive finding in his longitudinal study, Wells (1985) found no correlation between looking at picture books with later literacy development but did find a significant correlation with the reading of stories and later success.