When teachers really do focus on what are some of these underlying causes of under-achievement that are all too often evident in students' behaviour problems at home and at school, some wonderful positive things happen. That is, when students develop literacy skills, there is a significant reduction in their behaviour problems. There are so many inter-dependent factors that are associated with this that it's very difficult to isolate them. It means that we need to focus much more directly on developing all students' verbal and written communication skills - especially for boys. Boys are not reading as much as girls and their verbal communications with each other are not nearly so rich in terms of both nomenclature and syntax.
Many boys have difficulty in being able to process that kind of information.
Well, we also know that those parents who read to their children at a very young age and even up into their teenage years, and who listen to their children read - those children, regardless of whether they're boys or girls, develop very strong skills, but also a love of language and its use. So that when it comes to either reading or writing they feel a lot more comfortable about doing so. There is something which parents can do. However, we can't legislate as it were by bureaucratic fiat that parents do those kinds of things at home. However teachers do have a major impact on students, and that is in providing them with opportunities to read, even to rote learn things - poetry or songs and so forth, that have a major impact on developing a syntactical structure, a framework of thinking, which provides a firm foundation for reading, writing and understanding what they're reading and writing.