Abstract

Children learn a great deal of new vocabulary from reading. But how does that learning work? By introducing some of the most rugged findings of general memory research and applying them to popular children’s stories, I would like to show how many of the common stylistic choices made by writers for children can also be powerful aids to memory and vocabulary acquisition. If we then also consider the common reading behaviours of children, we can see that reading probably has even greater potential to encourage vocabulary learning than is normally argued in discussions of incidental learning.

Dominic Cheetham is a lecturer in Children’s Literature at Sophia University in Tokyo and a visiting scholar in the Faculty of Education. He has published on a variety of topics in children’s literature including the history of dragons, translation and translation theory, language learning, and history in children’s fiction.