Plus, there is no scientific evidence that teaching children to read early will help them be better readers in the long run. A study that compared two groups of children in New Zealand who started their formal literacy lessons at ages five and seven, respectively, showed no significant difference in reading ability by the time they were eleven years old. But the children who had started at five had developed a less positive attitude to reading and had worse text comprehension than the children who had started when they were seven. Other studies have shown no significant association between the
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