Reading is not a natural ability, but a complex skill that we are taught over

time. Children learn to read through a combination of explicit instruction,

practice, seeing models, and exposure to a rich variety of print. This
section explores what reading looks like from its beginnings before pre-K
to skilled reading in high school and beyond.

At the onset, children begin with the alphabet: letter names, sounds, and
formation alongside language play that fosters awareness of speech
sounds. Children apply this knowledge to read printed words. With
instruction and practice, they become more fluent and develop a corps of
sight words, and a lexicon of sounds, patterns and morphemes needed to
unlock unfamiliar words and texts.

Reading development is also influenced by other factors, such as

motivation, background knowledge, vocabulary, and cognitive skills. By
the end of high school, typical students are capable of complex reading,
spelling, and writing skills.

Typical stages of reading development

Word recognition and oral language comprehension are not equally

important at all stages of reading development. For typical readers,
word recognition tends to be especially important in the early stages of
learning to read, when children learn the alphabet and begin to develop
phonemic awareness, phonics and sight words. Word-recognition skills
tend to set a limit on reading comprehension in these early grades,
because even if children have strong oral language comprehension skills,
those skills cannot come into play while reading if they are unable to read
many words.

Once children become proficient at word recognition, their further growth

as readers tends to revolve more around language comprehension than
word reading. For typical readers, this shift usually occurs around fourth
grade, when typical readers have developed accurate and relatively
automatic word recognition. At this point, children can focus more of their
attention on reading for meaning. They can begin to use reading as a tool
for learning in content-area subjects such as history and science. Further
growth in reading becomes more about developing higher-level
comprehension abilities than about improving word recognition, although
some growth in word reading still occurs. Jeanne Chall (1983) referred to
this shift as the one from “learning to read” (in K to 3) to “reading to
learn” (in Grades 4 and up). Of course, struggling readers may continue to
have difficulties with word recognition well beyond third grade.
Reading experts like Linnea Ehri (1991, 2005), have identified the typical
stages of reading development. These phases are briefly described below,
in the context of typical expectations for reading by grade. Also see Spear-
Swerling (2015) for a detailed discussion of a typical continuum in learning
to read.

Keep in mind that the grade levels do not represent a series of “lock-step”
stages or phases. Rather an educator might use these as waypoints to
gauge the progress and pinpoint where a student’s assessed strengths
and weaknesses might fall as they learn how to read, write, and spell.

Struggling readers will require more support (time, repetition, and

exposures to explicit instruction) in order to make progress within a
literacy continuum.

Pre-K

At this stage, many children do not grasp the alphabetic principle and do
not understand that printed words need to be “decoded” with attention to
letters and letter patterns. For example, a typical four-year-old might
recognize the word stop on a stop sign because of the red octagonal
shape of the sign, but would not recognize the word stop printed on an
index card. Ehri (2005) referred to this stage of word reading as pre-
alphabetic.

Many preschoolers do recognize some letters, such as those in their

names, and they may grasp certain important print concepts, such as
being able to identify the front and back of a book, or the fact that it is the
print, not the pictures, that is “read.” These important print concepts are
more likely to be found in older preschoolers (ages 3 to 5) and in those
who have had ample exposure to literacy — for instance, from frequent
parental or teacher read-alouds. Also, children at this stage usually do
have a rudimentary level of phonological awareness, such as the ability to
rhyme or appreciate tongue-twisters.

End of kindergarten

By the end of kindergarten, typical children recognize all or nearly all

letters, both upper case and lower case; they can name and give sounds
for single letters, especially consonants. They may also know some short
vowel sounds, particularly if those are taught as part of the kindergarten
curriculum, and they may be starting to decode simple CVC (consonant-
vowel-consonant) words (e.g., man, sit, hop) — again, especially if these
skills are explicitly taught.
However, even when they have received some decoding instruction,
typical children at this stage of development lack knowledge of sounds for
many common letter patterns (e.g., ar, ee, oo, oa, igh, tch). They may
confuse similarly-spelled words such as boat and boot or meet and met.
Often they rely heavily on the first and last letters of a word rather than
looking carefully at all letters in a word to decode it. Ehri (2005) refers to
this stage of word reading as partial alphabetic, because children rely
only on partial phonics cues in reading words.

These characteristics are reflected in children’s spelling. Spelling errors

may involve omissions of or incorrect sequencing of sounds, for example,
especially in the middle of words. Because of their limitations in decoding,
children tend to be very dependent on picture or sentence context to help
read words at this stage. Also, their oral language comprehension far
exceeds their reading comprehension; they can comprehend much more
sophisticated texts in listening than in reading, because of their limited
word-recognition skills.

End of grade 1

Typical readers at the end of Grade 1 can decode a wide variety of

unfamiliar one-syllable, phonetically regular words, including words with
closed syllable patterns (e.g., man, fish, block, stamp), silent e (e.g., like,
same, spoke), open (e.g., no, go, be, cry, by), vowel r (e.g., car, star, her,
shirt), and vowel combinations (e.g., tree, stay, broom). Although at this
stage typical readers do recognize some common words automatically,
without the need for “sounding out,” they still need to apply their
decoding skills to many words, especially less common or long words. Ehri
(2005) refers to this phase as full alphabetic, because children typically
attend to all the phonetic cues in a word.

At this stage, children’s misspellings become more recognizable as the

intended word because all sounds are represented even if a word is not
spelled correctly (e.g., garbij for garbage). By the end of Grade 1, typical
readers are much less dependent on pictures or sentence context to read
words, because they have increasingly accurate skills for decoding
unknown words and do not need to rely on context cues as frequently.
However, children’s oral language comprehension still far exceeds their
reading comprehension at this stage.

End of grade 2

Children have an increasing ability to decode unfamiliar long words,

including words with consonant-le (e.g., stable, marble, needle),
phonetically regular two-syllable words (e.g., basement, invite, mistake),
and some multi-syllable words, especially words in their oral vocabularies
(e.g., butterfly, potato, remember). Typical readers at this stage (and
continuing into Grade 3) consolidate common letter patterns such as
those associated with common prefixes, suffixes, and other word parts, to
make word reading faster and more automatic. Ehri refers to this stage of
word recognition as consolidated alphabetic. This stage tends to be
one of rapid fluency development in text reading for typical children.
Children’s increased knowledge of common letter patterns also is
reflected in their improved spelling of words.

Grades 3 and 4

By the end of Grade 3, typical readers have largely mastered basic word
decoding skills, including skills for decoding most multisyllabic words,
except for unusual words (e.g., words of foreign derivation such
as rendezvous, or technical words such as photosynthesis). Typical
readers can decode most unfamiliar words quickly and easily and also
recognize most common words automatically (“by sight”). Thus, their
reading fluency (i.e., their ability to read text quickly and easily as well as
accurately) is generally well-established by this point, at least in grade-
appropriate texts.

In Grades 3 and 4, the comprehension and vocabulary demands of texts

used in school escalate substantially. Vocabulary and morphemic
knowledge become especially important to reading comprehension and
also to spelling. For example, if children know the meanings of common
morphemes, such as that geo means earth or astro means star, they can
use this knowledge to help infer the meanings of a variety of semantically
related words, such as geology, geologist, geological, astronomy,
astronomer, astronomical, and so on. Also, the spelling of morphemes is
generally stable across a variety of words, so if children can spell common
morphemes, this knowledge will improve their spelling as well as their
vocabulary development.

At this stage, children increasingly use strategies to aid reading

comprehension. These strategies include summarization, questioning, and
inferencing, along with “fix-up” strategies for when comprehension fails,
such as rereading or looking a word up in a dictionary. Students also learn
to vary their approach to reading depending on the purpose for reading
(e.g., studying for a test vs. reading for pleasure) and their knowledge
base about the topic (they to read more carefully if the topic is unfamiliar
and difficult).
Typical readers also are sensitive to differences in text structure,
recognizing that fiction and non-fiction texts are organized differently, and
they can use their knowledge about text structure to aid comprehension.
For example, in informational text, the key idea of a paragraph often is
contained in the first or last sentence; and headings and subheadings may
highlight important ideas.

Because typical readers are usually skilled decoders at this point, they can
devote more of their mental resources to comprehension. The gap
between reading comprehension and oral language comprehension begins
to narrow. Limitations on reading comprehension begin to revolve more
around limitations in oral language comprehension, vocabulary, and
background knowledge, than around word reading.

Middle and secondary levels

Reading is used as a tool in a wide variety of content area subjects such

as science, social studies, and history. Comprehension strategies and
speed of reading continue to develop. At this stage, typical readers are
developing higher-order comprehension abilities in reading, such as
integrating information from a variety of sources, reconciling differences
in viewpoints across texts, and appreciation of literary symbolism and
theme.

According to Biemiller (1999), even for typical readers, oral language

comprehension and reading comprehension do not become fully
comparable until about Grades 7 or 8. For adolescents and adults, reading
comprehension may sometimes exceed oral language comprehension, as
when students are reading complex narratives or dense informational
texts, such as a science chapter on DNA. However, oral language remains
an important avenue for learning even in the upper grades, particularly for
students who have reading problems.

For example, a high-school student with dyslexia may be able to develop

content knowledge and advanced comprehension abilities much more
easily through listening than through reading, because of ongoing
difficulties in decoding or reading fluency.

For typical students at this level, especially those who are avid readers,
reading becomes an increasingly important source of new vocabulary and
background knowledge. Unusual words are encountered much more
commonly in text than in spoken language, even the everyday
conversation of college-educated adults. Skilled readers tend to receive
more exposure to these unusual words and to new background
knowledge, because they usually read much more than do poor readers.
In fact, differences in volume of pleasure reading between good and poor
readers are massive.

For example, Cunningham and Stanovich (1998) estimated that fifth-

graders at the 90th percentile of reading achievement read the same
number of words in two days of out-of-school pleasure reading, as
students at the 10th percentile read in an entire year! These differences in
reading volume make an independent contribution to growth in reading
and language skills (Mol & Bus, 2011), and can further widen the gap in
achievement between good and poor readers. Avoiding this dynamic is
one reason why early intervention for reading problems is so important.

Below are highlights of typical literacy acquisition, supported by decades

of research. The timing of these accomplishments depends on
maturational and experiential differences among children, as well as the
curriculum provided by a school.

 Recognizes specific books by cover.

 Pretends to read books.

 Understands that books are handled in particular ways.

 Enters into a book-sharing routine with primary caregivers.

 Vocalization play in crib gives way to enjoyment of rhyming

language, nonsense word play, etc.

 Labels objects in books.

 Comments on characters in books.

 Looks at picture in book and realizes it is a symbol for real object.

 Listens to stories.

 Requests/commands adult to read or write.

 May begin attending to specific print such as letters in names.

 Uses increasingly purposive scribbling.

 Occasionally seems to distinguish between drawing and writing.

 Produces some letter-like forms and scribbles with some features of

English writing

 Children need a reason to communicate, so we need to give them one.

 Young children learn through their senses, actions and movements, so learning
English cannot be separated from other areas of learning and development. Providing
a context that is appealing and motivating for young children learning English is
essential.
 So while the aim of an activity might be to learn English, it is important that the
activity creates a genuine need for communication, so that the children are developing
language naturally and in context, as they would their home language.
 When planning any activity for young children, we need to plan for the whole child,
taking into account their age and stage of development.
 Activities designed to teach English to young children should be meaningful and in
context, so that the children can make the valuable connection between what they are
doing and the language they are hearing or need to use.