Teaching times for reading in USA, New Zealand, and internationally

The United States leads comparable countries in the time spent teaching reading to 9-10 year-olds at primary school - on average well over an hour at 109 minutes per day. New Zealand (Year 5) is behind USA (Fourth Grade) in teaching time but on average actually spends around an hour teaching reading at 68 minutes per day. However, this does not mean the US or New Zealand are leading other countries in their reading performance. Surprisingly, the US scores at only average performance while New Zealand comes in almost last out of comparable countries. This suggests that the time spent teaching reading is not a strong predictor of reading performance, and that other factors are likely to be more important.

It is not the time spent teaching that matters most; what matters is what is done during that space and time. For example, New Zealand leads the world in the amount of "silent reading" that teachers ask their students to do. Are they actually "reading" during this time? A 2016 survey showed New Zealand teachers rarely asked their Year 5 students to read aloud and consequently New Zealand had the highest percentage (88%) of students among English language countries who were asked daily to read silently on their own. This may be a factor in New Zealand's poor reading performance.