This article reviews 10 studies, comprising 11 samples, of the effects of r
eading to young children in schools. The age of the children varied between
31 and 90 months. Dependent variables were classified in 2 domains: oral l
anguage and reading skills. The combined effect size for the oral language
domain was d = .63, and for the reading domain d = .41. Although these figu
res look promising, caution is needed because the empirical evidence appear
s to be meager. Not only is the number of studies small, but a critical ana
lysis of the design of the studies generally reveals poor quality.