Children's Responses to Line Spacing in Early Reading Books or 'Holes to tell which line you're on'

Visible Language, 2006 by Reynolds, Linda, Walker, Sue, Duncan, Alison

Given the lack of experimental evidence on the effect of line spacing as a variable in early reading books, the study described here was intended to provide an insight into the effects of line spacing on children's reading performance and on their subjective responses to appearance of texts with different line spacing. In particular, the aim was to look at the effect of line spacing in realistic reading books when used in a realistic reading situation.

MATERIALS

Using realistic test material meant that the children's reading performance would be influenced by what Hughes and Wilkins (2000, 316) describe as the 'linguistic and semantic aspects of reading,' as well as the 'visual aspects.' In their studies of typography in children's reading schemes (2000) and 'big books' (2002), they used a Rate of Reading Test specially designed to minimize the influence of linguistic and semantic factors. The text consisted of fifteen randomly repeated common words, appearing as a paragraph but lacking any meaning. They found this method to be highly reliable, and in both studies it was sufficiently sensitive to pick up significant differences in reading performance as a result of variations in type size and spacing (letter and line). Our aim, however, was to examine the effect of line spacing in a normal reading situation. The testing was intended to replicate, as far as possible, a normal reading situation for children in Years 1 and 2 at UK primary schools. This would typically involve the child reading aloud to an adult on a one-to-one basis from an illustrated reading book produced to a high standard.

For this study, as for the previously mentioned work on typefaces and horizontal spacing, the text used was A sheepless night (Oxford, 1999), written by Geraldine McCaughrean and illustrated by Mike Spoor, part of the Oxford Literacy Web designed to fit the UK's National Literacy Strategy requirements in primary schools. It is part of the Oxford Literacy Web's Fiction Strand ('funpacked stories every child will love') and is aimed at children around six years old, likely to be in years 1 and 2 in primary schools. This relates to Individualised reading stage 7 (Moon, 2005), which is National Curriculum working within level 1, age 6-7.

In choosing the typographic variants to be tested, we were aware of the fact that there are complex inter-relationships between line spacing and other typographic factors. This was observed by Legros and Grant (1916), who discuss the many different factors affecting legibility, and confirmed by Tinker's (1963) extensive series of studies. Walls and Nisbel (1974), reviewing earlier work in this area, also argue that line spacing cannot usefully be studied as a variable in isolation from type size, line length and type weight, and that many studies that do isolate these variables are of limited practical value. However, testing different levels of several variables would result in a very large factorial experiment requiring large numbers of child participants. Our approach in this study, therefore, was to take into account the results of our previous experiments when selecting typographic variants other than line spacing.