Is it necessary to read classic literature for the 11 plus exam?

As a parent, I have spent many a happy night reading the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series with my son. They brought - and still do bring - so much enjoyment that, left without any coaxing from his parents, my son would probably still be reading - and laughing at - Diary of a Wimpy Kid to the exclusion of much other literature. And so, as the years have worn on, it is with sadness that I have found myself encouraging my son's consumption of classics at the forfeit of his own, more modern, literary preferences.

Implicit in this personal little story is the dilemma: should we parents be content that our children are just reading, or should we - especially those of us who have an eye no getting their children into a grammar school - be guiding our children towards the classics? Also implicit is the question: do the classics have some kind of property or properties that make them beneficial - more so than modern literature - to the child sitting an eleven plus exam?

Earlier this year, I was amused and intrigued when parents discussed this issue on another website's forum. I say amused because one parent contributing to that forum suggested that books commonly recommended for the eleven plus (the "classics", presumably) were written for our grandparents' generation, the corollary being that contemporary children's literature is written for our own children's generation (which, I suppose, is a truism). Other contributors expressed similar sentiments that children should read what they enjoy and that it is possible to pass the eleven plus exam without reading a classic.

And of course it is absolutely possible to pass the eleven plus exam without ever having read A Christmas Carol or Black Beauty or Treasure Island.

However, while I definitely do not believe children should forsake reading what they enjoy, I believe there is a preponderance of benefits to reading "classic" literature:

• Reading classic literature exposes the young reader to different vocabulary: it should go without saying that a child who has a broader vocabulary is more likely to succeed in the eleven plus exam than a child with a narrower vocabulary. A broad vocabulary will help equip the child to do well in both English and Verbal Reasoning exams, for example. Classic literature enriches the child's vocabulary because it exposes them to a particular set of vocabulary used at the time it was written. While, of course, there will be overlap between the vocabulary used in modern English literature and classic English literature (it is the same language after all), certain words would have had greater prominence in past times as certain words have greater prominence in present times. A child who reads classic literature is increasing their chances of exposure to valuable words (or, indeed, phrases) that have fallen out of common use but are still important. Take this from A Christmas Carol:

He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard.

Here, in one sentence, we have three words which are, in some way, unusual to the modern ear but certainly not words that would be considered obsolete or archaic.

In modern English the verb check more readily suggests examining something rather than, as it does in the above excerpt, hindering something or someone. Likewise when a modern ear encounters the word transport it understands it to mean "vehicles" and much less likely "strong emotions". But here, he - Scrooge - has his strong emotions halted by the ringing of church bells.

In fact, the use of the word check to mean "hinder the progress of", might cause a child to make an association with the game of chess and give new understanding to the phrase "putting the king in check." Or, put another way, experience of a word in one context might illuminate the meaning of the same word in a different context.

Lustiest is also an extant word but less common nowadays. If look at its adjectival form (lusty) in the graph above, we see that its use has declined steadily since the beginning of the 19th Century. It is by no means obsolete but, purely in terms of frequency, is a word less likely to be encountered in modern speech and, more to the point, modern writing.

The fact is that the greater concentration of unfamiliar words in classic literature should give a child a greater exposure to unknown words and a greater appreciation of the different meanings that words still have, despite being less widely used today.

• Exposure to classic literature will make an examination on classic literature less of a surprise: Of course, if a child reads classic literature and they are familiar with the styles of writing, choices of words and themes that existed in those writings, they will be less daunted if a passage from such a text comes up in an exam.

A child who has read Robert Louis Stevenson will be less daunted by Stevenson (or one of his peers) should they encounter his writings under stressful, timed conditions. While there is no certainty a child will be confronted with a passage from a classic novel in an exam (or any form of fiction for that matter), it will be harder for a child who has only read modern literature to comprehend a classic story in an exam than it will for a child who has challenged themselves with the classics already.

• The sentence structure in classical literature is more complex (part 1): There is, with modern literature, certainly literature after World War II, a general preference towards simpler sentences than there was, say, in Victorian times, an era that could produce very ornate and tortuous sentences. Taking a random sentence from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, we find this:

It was the first time that the lawyer had been received in that part of his friend's quarters; and he eyed the dingy, windowless structure with curiosity, and gazed round with a distasteful sense of strangeness as he crossed the theatre, once crowded with eager students and now lying gaunt and silent, the tables laden with chemical apparatus, the floor strewn with crates and littered with packing straw, and the light falling dimly through the foggy cupola.

In this extract we have a long(ish) sentence. The single sentence could have been broken into smaller, simpler sentences. As it is, the sentence has been protracted by Robert Louis Stevenson's controlled use of punctuation. This controlled use of punctuation should give a child an appreciation of the virtues of the semi-colon, the comma and clauses. Understanding of punctuation and of clauses is likely to be tested in an 11 plus English exam. The preponderance of punctuation, clauses and other mechanical aspects of writing (especially those in Victorian literature, or earlier) could, once the child gets used to this style of writing, strengthen their identification of, and their appreciation for, these types of linguistic mechanics. Modern literature will, undeniably, enlighten a child as to the virtues of punctuation and clauses but, by necessity, complex sentences are going to be stuffed full of punctuation and clauses that there is just more opportunity to encounter them.

Not only this, but longer, complex sentences take on a rhythm and musicality. Short sentences have rhythm and musicality, but longer sentences have the room to ebb and flow, speed up and slow down, promise and tantalise. Now, if these tortuous long sentences do engender an appreciation - a feel - for rhythm, this appreciation can be turned to poetry too. Poetry is perhaps the most dreaded thing that a child could be asked to comprehend in an exam. And yet, one of the most important things to aiding comprehension of a poem is the feeling of its rhythm. I would suggest that learning to "feel" the rhythm in longer sentences will help a child to "feel" the rhythm of a poem.

• The sentence structure in classical literature is more complex (part 2): As well as giving a child a wealth of opportunity to experience linguistic mechanics and rhythmic qualities, complex sentence structure also requires the child to hold more information in their head in order to understand a sentence. It is as though comma after comma, clause after clause, the pay-off of the sentence is being delayed, and that the long, complex sentence is forcing the child to maintain their attention and to increase their capacity to hold information. Maintenance of attention and holding information in one's head are skills not only beneficial to eleven plus English but also other areas too, e.g., Non-Verbal Reasoning where the child may be holding the image of a shape in their head and performing several rotations on it: if the child's attention breaks then the image of the shape could "drop" and the mental rotations of that shape lost!

In conclusion, I think there are definitely benefits for a child to read classic literature. I don't think it's essential for passing the 11 plus exam, but it certainly can help. Moreover, all of the benefits I've listed (a variety of vocabulary, exposure to punctuation, information retention) can, of course, be found in modern children's literature too. Clearly there's a balance to be had between reading, for example, Tracy Beaker and Lord of the Flies, as, after all, variety is the spice of life. But that's precisely the point: if the child only reads modern literature they do not benefit from the variety offered by classic literature as well.