Reading enjoyment and reading skills: Lessons from an experiment with first grade children

We consider a very intensive program targeted at low performing first graders identified by teachers as lacking appropriate parental support at home. The ambition of the program is to convey these children the daily contact with books that they may lack at home in order to develop their taste for reading and, eventually, their reading skills. Based on a controlled experiment in 109 French schools from deprived areas, we do find that taste for reading is significantly improved. However, there is no indication that this translates into higher reading skills, neither during the program year, nor during the next year.