I’ve selected newish research findings - provided in the years 2020 to 2025. The idea was to get some sense of how the Stage Model may have changed.

My early document comprised older documents to around 2004. This original material is still available in the later section of this document.

“Teachers involved in literacy instruction are continuously involved in decision‐making about the methods of instruction and the curriculum materials to employ with their students, and how to respond to their students' efforts along the road to skilled reading. There are various cues to which they may respond, but recent research suggests that some of these cues are not as useful as was first thought. Further, many teachers consider themselves ill‐equipped by their teacher‐training to make considered decisions in the best interests of all the students in their care. Attention to the stages of reading development can provide a framework for teachers to enable interpretation of student reading performance and appropriate assistance to those in need.”

Hempenstall , K. (2004). How Might a Stage Model of Reading Development be Helpful in the Classroom? Educational Psychology, 24(6), 727–751.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233433176_How_Might_a_Stage_Model_of_Reading_Development_be_Helpful_in_the_Classroom

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Integrating the Science of Reading and the Science of Behavior (2023)

Abstract

“Many Australian students fail to meet an acceptable standard of reading proficiency. This can negatively impact their academic progress, social, and emotional well-being, and increase their risk of developing challenging behaviors. These risks and challenges have been found to compound over the lifetime of the learner. Unfortunately, the proportion of Australian students who fail to meet reading proficiency standards increases as they move through their years of schooling, and reading difficulties disproportionately affect historically marginalized groups. This has raised concerns about the effectiveness of instructional approaches used within the Australian education system, particularly in reading, and prompted discussions of reform.

The purpose of this review paper was to examine the contributions of the science of reading and science of behavior to our collective knowledge regarding reading development and effective reading instruction, and how this knowledge is currently being used in the Australian context. We provide a discussion on the current state of reading instruction and achievement in Australia by considering national trends, inequities, and systemic challenges. Implications and recommendations to address inequities in reading outcomes, using both the science of reading and science of behavior, are discussed. …

In Conclusion

Significant change is required at the individual, school, and systems-levels if improvements in reading outcomes for Australian students are to be realized. Throughout the current paper, we have discussed how the science of reading and science of behavior are both aligned and necessary to achieving improved reading outcomes.

We want to conclude by emphasizing the role of the science of behavior in supporting the necessary changes at the individual, school, and system levels. While many consider the science of behavior to be limited to supporting behavior change at the level of the individual, successful applications at the level of cultures and systems have demonstrated that the science of behavior has the conceptual, theoretical, and practical tools to understand, predict, and influence change beyond the individual (Todorov & Freitas Lemos, 2020).

As Horner and Sugai (2015) suggested, organizations and systems do not behave, people within them do. As such, the science of behavior allows for an assessment of implementation behavior – and the challenges of implementation – with a view to understanding lawful relationships between the environments within which individuals and groups work, and their implementation or reading instruction behaviors (Noell & Gansle, 2009). By underpinning this change with the science of behavior, it is our hope that implementers and system leaders across Australia can focus their efforts on creating the antecedent conditions that support effective reading instruction in Australian schools.

That is, preparing pre-service teachers with knowledge from the science of reading and practices from the science of behavior, aligning systems-level policies, providing the necessary training, and creating structures of ongoing support may all serve to set the occasion for the successful and scaled implementation of effective reading instruction across Australian schools. Critically, data must be used to guide decision-making at the school, district, and state levels. Positive outcomes must be celebrated as a way to positively reinforce teacher and school-wide implementation, secure ongoing resources, and ensure that implementation can be sustained. Focusing on these practices and the creation of these supports at the individual and systems levels may allow for the creation of contingencies that encourage, evoke, and reinforce instructional practices that move Australian teachers toward the prized goal of improved student reading outcomes (Cihon & Mattaini, 2020).”

Stocker, Karina L.; Fox, Russell A.; Swain, Nathaniel R.; Leif, Erin S. (2023). Between the Lines: Integrating the Science of Reading and the Science of Behavior to Improve Reading Outcomes for Australian Children.  Behavior and social issues, 33(1): 504–531. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42822-023-00149-y

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How Important Is Teaching Literacy in All Content Areas?

You’re busy this summer planning and reworking lessons—adding, adjusting, and tweaking. Fast-forward to fall: We know students do plenty of listening in our classes, but what about the other three communication skills they should be engaging in and practicing daily? I’m talking about reading, writing, and speaking. Let’s define literacy. It was once known simply as the ability to read and write. Today it’s about being able to make sense of and engage in advanced reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Someone who has reached advanced literacy in a new language, for example, is able to engage in these four skills with their new language in any setting.

Literacy Is an Every-Century Skill

If you are a math, history, science, or art teacher, where does literacy fit into your instruction? It’s common to believe that literacy instruction is solely the charge of language arts teachers, but, frankly, this just is not so. As Richard Vaca, author of Content Area Reading: Literacy and Learning Across the Curriculum, says, “Adolescents entering the adult world in the 21st century will read and write more than at any other time in human history. They will need advanced levels of literacy to perform their jobs, run their households, act as citizens, and conduct their personal lives.”

With content standards looming, it’s easy to focus only on the content we teach. We have so much to tell students and share with them. However, are we affording students enough time daily to practice crucial communication skills?

Here’s one way to look at it: Content is what we teach, but there is also the how, and this is where literacy instruction comes in. There are an endless number of engaging, effective strategies to get students to think about, write about, read about, and talk about the content you teach. The ultimate goal of literacy instruction is to build a student’s comprehension, writing skills, and overall skills in communication.

Ask yourself, how do I mostly convey the information and knowledge to my students? Do I turn primarily to straight lecture or teacher talk? Or do I allow multiple opportunities for students to discover information on their own?

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Speaking

Academic or high-level conversations in small and large group settings do not just happen. It takes time—and scaffolding—to create a Socratic seminar setting in your classroom.

In order for our students to engage in academic conversation, or accountable talk, they need plenty of practice with informal conversation in pairs and triads. Use the following strategies frequently for building students’ oral skills: think-pair-share, elbow partner, shoulder share, and chunk and chew. Kids need to be talking and not sitting passively in their seats. Remember, Lev Vygotsky believed learning to be a very social act.

For every five to eight minutes that you talk, give students one to two minutes to talk to each other. You can walk around and listen, informally assessing and checking for understanding.

Conversation helps immensely when we’re processing new content and concepts. Students also will surely have more fruitful answers to share. (And be sure to always provide think time when asking questions of students.)

Writing

When was the last time your students had sore hands from writing in your class? Just like conversation, writing helps us make sense of what we are learning and helps us make connections to our own lives or others’ ideas. You can’t avoid thinking when you write.

Students need to be writing every day, in every classroom. How about adding to your instruction more informal and fun writing activities like quick writes, stop and jots, one-minute essays, or graffiti conversations? Not all writing assignments need be formal ones.

If you haven’t heard of the National Writing Project (NWP), it’s the largest-scale and longest-standing teacher development program in U.S. history. Workshops are offered nationwide (usually through a local university); teachers of all content areas learn new and exciting strategies to encourage, support, and grow the young writers in their classrooms.

Two tenets of the NWP that I think produce wide gains in student writing: teachers writing side-by-side with students, and creating time on a regular basis in your classroom for writer’s workshop that follows a type of writing process that puts the writer in charge (of content, voice, and structure).

Reading

The days of believing that we could hand informational text or a novel to a student and assume they make full meaning of it on their own are gone. Whether we like it or not, regardless of the content we teach, we are all reading instructors.

Scaffolding the reading by using effective strategies for before, during, and after reading—such as previewing text, reading for a purpose, making predictions and connections, think alouds, and using graphic organizers—will support all our students, not just struggling readers and English learners.

We need to inspire a love for reading, and build reading stamina in our students, which means eyes and mind on the page for more than a minute. How do we do this? A high-interest classroom library is a great place to start. If you are a Title I school, there should be funds set aside for classroom libraries. If not, advocate for all classrooms at your school site to have a library, even if it’s just a handful of books to get you going.

You can make the investment yourself, or have a book-raiser party. Email all your friends a wish list for books that students have requested and recurring favorites (e.g., Twilight, Guinness Book of World Records). Ask your friends to bring one or two of the books to your cocktail party. (Read this Edutopia post for ideas on how to set up and manage your classroom library).

If you are a physics teacher, do all your books need to be about science? Absolutely not! But you might want to focus primarily on informational, nonfiction books. In fact, with the new national standards for English emphasizing more nonfiction text and quite a bit less literature, all K–12 teachers need to enhance their libraries with more nonfiction, which can include newspaper and magazine subscriptions.

Rebecca Alber  (2024). How Important Is Teaching Literacy in All Content Areas.  Eutopia.

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/literacy-instruction-across-curriculum-importance

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Assistive Technology Interventions and Equity Within Literacy Instruction: Comparing Activity Theory Models (2022)

Abstract

“This study examines ways to provide assistive technology interventions within literacy courses for adolescents and young adults with disabilities. Instead of separating students from their peers during reading and writing assignments, literacy teachers who implement assistive technology can support equitable access to school curricula and technology-based learning resources.

Unresolved questions about teacher training and accessibility led to the problem statement: What technology resources have special education service providers found useful during literacy instruction for students with support needs? Research reporting findings from intervention studies and/or interviews with educators showed differences between activity systems in secondary and post-secondary environments.

Teachers' beliefs and expectations about student characteristics and the need for individual assistance could contribute to inequities in access to literacy instruction. The thematic analysis revealed practices within literacy classes that can decrease or maintain inequities for students with support needs.

Literacy instruction encompasses grammar, listening, oral language, reading, speaking, spelling, viewing, and writing, and should be found in all K-12 schools as both (1) instructional time when literacy comprehension and skills are the exclusive focus and (2) instructional time when literacy comprehension and skills are integrated into academic content subject areas.”

 Lipson, C. (2022). Assistive Technology Interventions and Equity Within Literacy Instruction: Comparing Activity Theory Models.  DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-8860-4.ch012.

Handbook of Research on Challenging Deficit Thinking for Exceptional Education Improvement

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Project Management and Education: Improving Learning and Student Success (2024).

“The importance of project management (PM) in education has become increasingly evident in our evolving technology-ridden lives. Educators are required to manage complex projects involving multiple stakeholders, resources, and deadlines. These requirements make project management methods of particular interest to educators looking for practical tools.

Using project management principles, educators can effectively teach and improve their students' learning outcomes. Project management gives students valuable skills, allowing them to succeed personally and professionally. This merger can contribute to the long-term success of students and the marriage of project management fundamentals, methods, and practices with academics.

It is critical to highlight the benefits of learning PM skills for students. In such an environment as the current workforce, the ability to manage projects effectively is crucial. Nieto-Rodriguez (2019) defines projects as temporary endeavors to create unique products, services, or results. He suggests that approaching projects from a strategic standpoint is increasingly seen as the primary way organizations innovate and adapt to rapid technological changes, market demand, and global challenges. Further, he points out that the rise of a project-based economy coincides with a growing need for agility and adaptability in business.

The modern workforce has yet to realize the growing importance of PM skills. Students with PM capabilities have a distinct advantage in a dynamic economic landscape where versatility and multifaceted skill sets are highly prioritized. The relevance of the role of PM in education has gained prominence, though, mirroring the demands of a workforce increasingly driven by project-based and team-oriented tasks. By embedding PM curricula into education, institutions ensure that students are knowledgeable and possess the competencies to effectively apply their knowledge to diverse professional scenarios.

Educational systems worldwide recognize the need to prepare students to thrive in a landscape where project execution is necessary for professional success. Integrating PM principles and methodologies into the educational sector significantly enhances teaching, learning, and the student experience. Moreover, the incorporation of learner-centered pedagogies in PM education emphasizes the need to align educational strategies with the evolving needs of students. By integrating PM and training into the curriculum, academic institutions can prepare students effectively for many future roles, ensuring they possess both the technical competencies and the soft skills required in today's dynamic work environments.

Educators can cultivate an adaptive, engaging, and student-focused learning environment by systematically incorporating these methods, skills, training, and software (Trilling & Ginevri, 2017). This incorporation prepares students for the complexities of modern project work and contributes to the continuous improvement of educational standards and practices. One study demonstrates that students participating in PM courses are more likely to be employed after graduation. Specifically, the study shows a 10% increase in employment rates among students who have received PM training compared to those who have not (Zhang & Ma, 2023).

This finding suggests that employers value the skills gained from PM education. Numerous studies examine the impact of PM education on students' skills. Research demonstrates that project-based learning significantly enhances students' problem-solving skills, particularly in civil engineering and construction management, through structured role-playing and project execution planning (Zhang et al., 2019). Furthermore, one meta-analysis indicates that project-based learning substantially improves students' learning outcomes, academic achievement, and critical thinking abilities (Zhang & Ma, 2023).

Collins and Chiaramonte (2017) explore the effects of project-based learning on student self-efficacy and perceived justice, highlighting its benefits in fostering a sense of fairness and confidence among students, who, with PM training, experience increased problem-solving, decision-making, and communication skills. According to Zhang et al. (2019), PM education allows students to acquire these skills in a real-world context, positively affects students' PM knowledge, and correlates with increased academic performance. Zhang and Ma (2023) found students with PM training exhibited improved PM knowledge, student motivation, teamwork, and leadership abilities.

They also show that PM skills can help students better understand the organization and execution of complex projects and suggest this knowledge will be valuable in their future careers, as they will likely be involved in projects of all sizes and types

Students can acquire these skills in several ways, as many books, online resources, courses, and certifications are available. Students can also gain experience by working on projects in their personal lives or volunteer settings (PMI, 2024).

Regardless of how students choose to learn, PM is an asset, and possessing these skills can help students succeed in both their careers and personal lives. PM requires that students plan and organize. These skills can help students develop strong organizational and time management skills. Traditional PM education, often rigid and theory-focused, may not align with the complexities of real-world projects.

Bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application is crucial in making education more relevant and valuable (Serdyukov, 2017). Innovations like Agile methodologies emphasize flexibility and responsiveness, and integrating practical projects into education can provide students with hands-on experience. This approach more effectively prepares students for real-world challenges, highlighting the importance and relevance of PM in education (Ilomäki & Lakkala, 2019).

PM requires students to identify and solve problems, make decisions, and work effectively in teams (Trilling & Ginevri, 2017). These skills are critical for career success and are transferrable to many fields. PM requires students to collaborate with others to achieve common goals, helping them develop strong collaboration skills necessary for meeting personal and professional goals. The workforce can be challenging at times, and students must be able to adapt to changes. PM can help build resilience and flexibility, both essential for career success (Trilling & Ginevri, 2017).

Completing a project is a rewarding experience, instilling a sense of accomplishment in students that boosts their confidence and self-esteem (Zhang & Ma, 2023). The real-world applications of PM allow students to apply their knowledge and skills through hands-on projects, which can be highly motivating and engaging. This hands-on experience helps students understand their learning concepts (Collins & Chiaramonte, 2017). Overall, PM provides various valuable skills to help students succeed personally and professionally. Whether planning a complex project, working in a team, or communicating with clients and colleagues, PM gives students the tools they need to succeed.

Even, A. M. (2024). Project Management and Education: Improving Learning and Student Success. International Journal of Curriculum Development and Learning Measurement (IJCDLM), 5(1), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.4018/IJCDLM.353926

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Key Stages of Reading Development AI Overview

The Stage Model of Reading Development describes the progression of reading skills from pre-literacy to fluent reading. This model helps educators understand and support students' reading development at different ages and stages. It highlights the sequential, yet variable, progression of reading skills. 

Key Stages of Reading Development:

1. 1. Emergent Literacy (Pre-reading):

This stage, lasting from birth to around age 6, focuses on developing foundational skills like recognizing that print contains meaning, understanding book handling, and developing phonemic awareness (rhyming). 

2. 2. Early Reading (Initial Reading):

Children in this stage, typically between grades 1-2.5, start decoding simple words using letter-sound relationships, recognizing a growing number of sight words, and reading simple texts independently. 

3. 3. Transitional Reading (Fluency):

This stage, often between grades 2-3, involves increasing fluency, expanding decoding skills, and reading simple chapter books independently. 

4. 4. Fluent Reading:

In this stage, students become confident readers, can read independently and understand text, and can apply reading strategies to integrate cueing systems, according to Reading Rockets. 

Variations in the Model:

• Ehri's Phases of Word Reading:

This model focuses on the development of word recognition, highlighting stages like pre-alphabetic, early alphabetic, later alphabetic, and consolidated alphabetic, according to Google Sites. 

• Chall's Stages:

Chall's model includes prereading, initial reading, confirmation, fluency, and reading for learning the new. 

Importance in the Classroom:

• Curriculum and Instruction:

Understanding the stages helps educators tailor instruction to meet the specific needs of each student, whether they are in the emergent, early, or fluent reading stage, according to YouTube. 

• Assessment:

By understanding the stages, educators can use assessments to monitor student progress and identify areas where students may need additional support, according to YouTube. 

• Supporting Student Needs:

The stage model provides a framework for differentiating instruction and providing targeted interventions to support students who may be struggling with specific aspects of reading, according to Google Sites. 

AI Overview

Chall’s Stages of Reading Development (2024)

Jeanne Chall, a leading researcher in the field of reading, developed what is referred to as Chall’s Stages of Reading Development in 1983. In her research, Chall determined that reading skills developed in a hierarchy, each skill layering upon the previous. As an overview, Chall’s stages of reading include:

Stage 0: Prereading: Approximately Birth to Age 6. In this stage, children “play” read. By being read to, they have begun to understand that books contain words that provide meaning. They may “read” books from memory, start demonstrating book-handling skills, and begin “writing” the alphabet.

Stage 1: Initial Reading and Decoding: Approximately Ages 6-7 / Grades 1-2. Children begin to understand the alphabetic principle and can connect sounds to symbols. In this stage, children read small books containing high-frequency sight words.

Stage 2: Confirmation and Fluency: Approximately Ages 7-8 / Grades 2-3. In this stage, children read familiar books to begin applying aspects of fluency.

Stage 3: Reading for Learning the New: Approximately Ages 8-14 / Grades 4-8. At this point in Chall’s stages, instruction shifts from learning to read to reading to learn. Now, students read a variety of materials in order to learn new concepts.

Stage 4: Multiple Viewpoints: Approximately Ages 15-18 / Grades 9-12. During the high school years, students are required to read a variety of materials, expository, and narrative, that contain differing viewpoints to compare and contrast.

Stage 5: Construction and Reconstruction: Approximately Ages 18+ / College level and beyond. Finally, as people continue to read throughout their lives, they read relevant material in order to enhance what they already know through what they have read. This type of reading allows for the development of a new schema.

Students may move through the stages at varying paces, and not necessarily in a linear progression because reading development is a dynamic process that will not always follow a clear continuum. Nevertheless, Chall’s stages can be a helpful framework for generally understanding the hierarchical progression of reading.

​​Chall, J. S. (2024). Stages of reading development. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

https://www.landmarkoutreach.org/strategies/challs-stages-reading-development/#:~:text=Stage%200:%20Prereading:%20Approximately%20Birth,begin%20%E2%80%9Cwriting%E2%80%9D%20the%20alphabet.

What Are the 5 Stages of Reading Development?

https://www.voyagersopris.com/vsl/blog/stages-of-reading-development

Quick Takeaway

“Reading development unfolds across five stages. The first stage, emergent pre-reading (ages 0 to 5), sets students up for future literacy by encouraging them to engage with books. The second stage, early reading (ages 5 to 7), sees children interacting with words and beginning to learn decoding and phonics. In the third stage, transitional reading (ages 7 to 9), students shift from learning to read to reading to learn, enhancing their fluency and exploring diverse literature independently. The fourth stage, intermediate reading (ages 9 to 12), introduces critical thinking and more complex texts. Finally, in the advanced reading stage (ages 12 and up), students develop skills to evaluate, analyze, and synthesize texts, preparing them for lifelong literacy. By understanding and investing in these stages, educators can ensure a comprehensive approach to reading instruction that promotes lasting success.

While instructors have extensive knowledge about reading development, the theories in education are ever-evolving. Educators are always seeking ways to stay up to date with the latest research. This principle is especially true for educators who specialize in early childhood education. 

Having an expansive knowledge of reading development is crucial in a teaching environment. Reading development can be dissected into five stages. These five stages include: 

• Emergent pre-reading (0 to 5 years old): This is the first stage of reading development. In this stage, students are beginning to identify and recognize letters and some words they may see on a page such as “stop” and “go.” This is known as letter identification and print awareness.
• Early reading (5 to 7 years old): This is the second stage of reading development where many children begin interacting with words and begin to learn to read through decoding and phonics. 
• Transitional reading (7 to 9 years old): This is the third stage and is described as the stage where students move from learning to read to reading to learn. Students expand their reading fluency, increase their reading independence, and begin interacting with varying types of literature. 
• Intermediate reading (9 to 12 years old): This is the fourth stage where students begin to incorporate critical thinking in their reading by reading more complex texts. 
• Advanced reading (12 years and older): This is the fifth stage of reading development and expands from 12 years old to adulthood. At this stage, students begin to evaluate, analyze, and synthesize the texts they are reading. 

Understanding Reading Development

Since the beginning of application is knowledge, having an understanding of the stages of reading development gives instructors the opportunity to utilize their personal knowledge in their students’ lessons by: 

• Creating space for focused lesson planning.
• Teaching from understanding, not just knowledge.  
• Creating interactive activities that meet students’ learning needs and goals through fun and creative approaches. 

The Initial Stage: Early Learning (ages 0–5)

This stage is significant because children begin to develop their early literacy skills. They learn sounds and begin to understand letters and words. Children in this stage of literacy are beginning to learn and respond to their names, recognize some letters and their sounds, sing the ABCs, and pretend to be able to read children's books. 

Teachers can support their students in this stage of their development through various teaching methods. To name a few: Incorporating music, colorful pictures, and performing “repeat back” lessons and exercises to reinforce the connection between words, letters, and sounds. Lessons for students in the early learning stage are designed to be short and repetitive. 

Moving Forward: Growth Into Early Reading (ages 5–7)

This stage can be referred to as the “alphabetic fluency” stage. Children in this stage are learning to build upon skills from the early learning stage where they were becoming familiar with letters, words, sounds, children’s books, and singing the ABCs. Students in this stage of reading development require heavy assistance and guidance as they learn to read. In this stage, children begin to exhibit these new skills, behaviors, and patterns: 

• They are no longer “pretending” to read books. 
• They point at words with their fingers as they read. 
• They recognize words. 
• They let instructors know when they do not know a word. 
• They are reading out loud to others, word by word.

The Transitional Phase: From Early to Intermediate Reading (ages 7–9)

The transitional phase can be summarized as the stage in the reading process where students begin to understand the words they are reading and are progressing from the earlier reading stages. In this stage, students begin to develop stronger reading comprehension and literacy skills. This is also the stage when students begin to vary the most in their skill levels. Each student is different and learns at their own pace. 

Students in this stage are beginning to feel confident in their reading and do not need to sound out words as frequently. Their reading skills are improving and expanding and they typically feel more comfortable with reading in general. They still require assistance with reading and learning new words, however, their ability to read and spell words is improving.

Advancing to Intermediate Reading (ages 9–12)

At this stage, children are less reliant on learning materials such as reading charts and visual aids and are becoming increasingly independent as they read. They require less assistance from instructors and are learning to extract information from the text. At this stage, they are learning more from the texts they are reading. 

Students in this stage have developed increased reading stamina. Since their attention spans are growing, they are able to read more text for longer periods of time, uninterrupted. Children are also developing their abilities to analyze various texts and elements throughout a text (i.e. plot, theme, character development, and figurative language). This also comes as students' reading comprehension skills expand. 

Instructors can support children in this stage by encouraging open discussion. Instructors can facilitate this in the classroom by having students read independently and then follow up with group or entire classroom discussions. Group discussion gives each student an opportunity to openly convey their thoughts while also hearing other students' interpretations. There are a number of ways instructors can facilitate this type of discussion: 

• Debates: Instructors can have their students read a text, then split them into different groups on either side of the classroom based on their opinions to perform group debates. This strategy also allows students to openly and safely express their thoughts in a controlled environment. 
• Classroom discussion: Students read a text and the instructor asks questions where students who want to answer raise their hands and give their thoughts.
• Small-group discussion: Students read a text together in small groups and then review a series of questions together to assist with text analysis. The instructor can then have each group choose one person as a representative to the class to discuss their group's answers. 

The Final Stage: Advanced Reading (ages 12+)

The final stage of reading development is known as advanced reading. This stage of reading development encompasses school-aged children and adults and is marked by these characteristics: Deep comprehension, synthesis and analysis, critical thinking, vocabulary advancement, and advanced writing skills. 

At this stage of reading development, children and adults are able to consume and understand various reading materials, genres, and texts. They are able to comprehend and interpret what they are reading independently and require little to no assistance with reading from their instructors. 

Instructors continue to play an important role in the final stage by encouraging their students’ reading development—they can develop their students’ reading abilities by providing access to various texts and genres to read independently and then giving them assignments that facilitate critical thinking and writing development. They can also encourage students to analyze the texts they are reading and explain their analysis. 

Incorporating Reading Development Stages in the Classroom

There is no doubt instructors carry a heavy burden ensuring each of their students is a successful reader in and out of the classroom. With this in mind, instructors can use their knowledge of reading development to create lesson plans that fit the needs of their students at each stage. 

General strategies instructors can use at each stage of reading development include: 

• Emergent pre-reading: Instructors teaching students at this stage can encourage reading growth through colorful charts, songs that teach various words and sounds, as well as hands-on activities that allow students to practice sounds like phoneme-grapheme mapping. 
• Early reading: At this stage, students begin decoding words. With this in mind, instructors can create lesson plans that focus on sight words, practicing phonics, and encouraging read-aloud exercises to improve fluency. 
• Transitional reading: Children in this stage can grow their literacy skills through discussion and increased reading. Since they are in a transitory stage and becoming more independent as they read, discussion can help serve as a catalyst to encourage reading as well as gauge where the child is in their abilities. 
• Intermediate reading: While parental involvement is critical at all stages of reading development, it is especially important in this stage. Instructors can encourage their students' growth by also encouraging parents to provide a wide variety of reading materials at home for their children. 
• Advanced reading: In this stage, introducing more complex reading materials as well as encouraging discussions in and out of the classroom aids in promoting the student’s reading development. Instructors can do this through short group assignments and long-term group projects to encourage discussion beyond the classroom. 

Instructors must evaluate their students’ progress and quickly intervene if any of them are showing signs of reading failure. In other words, if an intervention is required, the need is great for the individual. 

If a student is not succeeding with the provided materials and solutions, the instructor may consider taking a different approach with that student. The instructor can gauge the student’s progress through assessments at the beginning of the intervention, in the middle, and at the end of the intervention to determine improvement. 

As the instructor creates an individualized learning plan for their student, there are a number of different variables to consider including various teaching and supplementary materials, varying degrees of explicitness, time allocated to additional instruction, as well as the size of a reading group. It is also important to emphasize that personalized reading instruction does not necessarily require one-to-one student/teacher instruction.

There is evidence that supports that even small groups of three students to one teacher in this setting can be beneficial, and students demonstrated notable reading improvement. While one-on-one instruction is highly beneficial, the success of three student group sizes has demonstrated great outcome measures (Vaughn, et al), suggesting students can also learn from each other in this setting. To summarize, timely intervention and personalized learning intervention are keys to student success and improvement for those in need. 

The Role of Evidenced-Based Reading Resources in Reading Development Stages

In the same way one might look for quality in various investments, the same mentality should be applied when it comes to reading instruction. Investing in quality learning solutions ensures students are receiving evidence-based instruction through each stage of reading development. These solutions are designed to deliberately ensure reading success. 

Voyager Sopris Learning^® provides educators with evidence-based reading intervention solutions to ensure students are successful in the classroom and in life. Our solutions provide information and ideas for instruction such as: How to teach reading comprehension, various activities instructors can use to promote fluency, and interventions for struggling students. 

Reference:

Voyager Sopris Learning. (2024). What Are the 5 Stages of Reading Development?

https://www.voyagersopris.com/vsl/blog/stages-of-reading-development

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Some useful texts

• Understanding Reading Development
• The Initial Stage: Early Learning (ages 0–5)
• Moving Forward: Growth Into Early Reading (ages 5–7)
• The Transitional Phase: From Early to Intermediate Reading (ages 7–9)
• Advancing to Intermediate Reading (ages 9–12)
• The Final Stage: Advanced Reading (ages 12+)
• Incorporating Reading Development Stages in the Classroom
• The Role of Evidenced-Based Reading Resources in Reading Development Stages

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“For some children, learning to read and write occurs almost effortlessly. For others, every literacy milestone is a monumental struggle. Understanding how and why children learn to read is critical for planning effective instruction.   

Researchers design and test models of reading to provide an explanation for how reading develops. These models shape educators’ beliefs and guide how to plan classroom instruction and intervention. Cognitive scientist Dr. Mark Seidenberg (2017) argues that how students are taught to read should be based on rigorous research evidence not on teacher intuition or long-held teaching practices. 

The simple view of reading

Let’s look at one model of reading comprehension that has been widely tested and accepted among reading researchers: the simple view of reading (SVR). Phil Gough and William Tunmer (1986) developed an elegant concise theory to describe what must happen to comprehend print. They described the act of reading comprehension as the product of two cognitive skills: 

Decoding  x  Language Comprehension = Reading Comprehension.     

In the SVR model,  good reading comprehension requires the interaction of two broad sets of abilities: decoding (D) or word recognition and language comprehension (LC). If one or both sides of the equation are missing or diminished, then reading comprehension will suffer or even be absent.   

So, if you add 0’s (skill is not present) and 1’s (skill IS present) to the equation:

• 1 (D) X 1 (LC) =  1 (good reading comprehension)
• 0 (D) X  1 (LC) = 0  (poor reading comprehension because of word recognition deficits, often seen with dyslexia) 
• 1 (D) X  0 (LC) = 0  (poor reading comprehension because of oral language comprehension deficits, often seen with hyperlexia) 

For young readers, decoding is a better predictor of their reading success, but once children master decoding and get older, the skills under language comprehension become more important for reading success. 

Let’s look at a list of the skills included within the SVR framework: 

Using the SVR in instruction

The SVR equation helps educators to pinpoint students’ strengths and weak areas in reading, and identify three different types of reading difficulties a student may have: dyslexia, hyperlexia, and garden variety poor reading (mixed types). Students who have poor skills on both sides of the equation, or what David Kilpatrick calls “mixed types”, are the most common type of reading difficulty in U.S. schools. Students with dyslexia  or poor word reading and adequate language comprehension are less common. Very few students are what some teachers call “word callers” or hyperlexic. Understanding the different reader profiles is useful for planning classroom instruction and support. 

The SVR predicts 4 different types of reading

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Voices from the field: Linda Farrell

Reading expert Linda Farrell explains the simple view of reading, in this clip from our Looking at Reading Interventions series.

 Scarborough’s Reading Rope

As we learn more about the simple view of reading, we discover that it’s not actually so simple. Each part of the simple view equation represents a set of specific sub-skills or factors related to reading. Hollis Scarborough’s  popular infographic, the “Reading Rope” (2001) helps educators understand how the SVR sub-skills combine and intertwine to support learning to read.   

Some educators may confuse Scarborough’s infographic as a separate model from the simple view of reading, but essentially it shows us visually what’s most important for teaching reading. The reading rope complements and adds some sub-skills, but it is not separate from the simple view of reading.

Modified from Scarborough, H.S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, Theory, and Practice. In S. Neuman & D. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook for research in early literacy. New York: Guilford Press.

Expanding the simple view of reading

Although the simple view addresses the cognitive factors in reading, some researchers have expanded upon the SVR model to include school, home, and psychological factors that influence reading. Let’s look at two promising models: the componential model and the active view of reading.  

Componential Model 

Aaron and Joshi (2000) expanded the simple view of reading into the componential model of reading.  The componential model builds upon the SVR and has three areas: cognitive, psychological, and ecological factors for reading. The componential model encourages educators to go beyond cognitive skills and to consider school and home factors when planning instruction.

Componential Model (Aaron & Joshi, 2000); Aaron, Joshi, & Quatroche, 2008)

Active View of Reading

“Nell Duke and Kelly Cartwright (2021) propose that not all reading problems fall neatly under decoding or language comprehension. They argue that some areas such as vocabulary, morphology (meaningful word parts), and fluency influence both sides of the SVR equation and cannot be adequately explained by the simple view of reading.  

This active view of reading model expands the simple view to include a bridge between decoding and language comprehension and adds self-regulation skills a reader uses to monitor their reading. Self-regulation of reading means the reader uses neurocognitive skills to attend, plan, organize, strategize, and remember how to read a text.  

Although there is research for each of this model’s individual components, the complete active view model has not been rigorously tested yet. You can read the complete article about the active view of reading, The Science of Reading Progresses: Communicating Advances Beyond the Simple View of Reading

The Active View of Reading © 2021 Nell K. Duke & Kelly B. Cartwright. Reading Research Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Literacy Association.

Other models of reading: Dual-Route Theory

Another proposed model is the dual-route theory, which suggests that there are two pathways in the brain for word reading: a phonological route and an orthographic route. The phonological route involves applying letter-sound relationships to sound out unfamiliar words. The orthographic route identifies a familiar word by its spelling patterns.” 

Construction-Integration Model (CIM)

In the construction-integration model (CIM) described by Dr. Walter Kinstch (1988), readers assemble meaning from texts by building a mental blueprint of the text. CIM assumes that reading comprehension must include factors such as:

• activating prior knowledge, 
• generating inferences, 
• resolving inconsistencies, and 
• integrating information across sentences and paragraphs. 

According to the CIM model, reading comprehension happens in two stages. First readers generate a set of propositions or ideas about the text during reading. These initial interpretations form a networked blueprint or mental map. This first stage relies heavily on the reader’s prior knowledge and expectations about the text.

In the second stage, the reader must choose the best interpretation that makes the most sense based on the available evidence and context. To do this, the reader must monitor their reading and use strategies to repair it when breakdowns occur. Children evaluate and revise their thinking until they have a stable, consistent mental representation of the text. You can get an idea of how this model works below.

According to the CIM, teachers should use assessment and instruction to foster higher-order thinking skills and show children how to monitor and repair as they build a mental model of the text. This last model focuses heavily on what happens as a reader responds to a text. Unlike the earlier models, CIM thinks about reading comprehension as a process rather than a set of specific teachable sub-skills.

These are some of the current models used by researchers to explain how reading develops and the processes and skills behind learning to read and spell words.

Why these models are important

You might be thinking, “I’m not a researcher, so why do I need to know about this?”

A basic understanding of these models is important, since they can guide our decisions about  which reading programs and instructional practices are promising and are in line with how children read. We can eliminate instructional practices that lack evidence and waste precious instructional time. Finally, for teachers of struggling readers, these models provide insight into why a child might have trouble learning to read, so you can target specific assessment and intervention supports”.

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Introduction to the science of reading

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Understanding the cognitive science behind how students learn to read and the research on effective instruction makes it easier for educators to align policy and classroom teaching with evidence.

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The science of reading

“The ability to read proficiently is fundamental to a student’s success at school and in later life. The science of reading provides the strongest evidence about how young children learn to read. Understanding the cognitive science behind how students learn to read and the research on effective instruction makes it easier for educators to align policy and classroom teaching with evidence.

Cognitive science explains how the brain learns skills that are not innate or ‘biologically primary’. Speaking is a biologically primary skill that humans have evolved to learn or ‘pick up’ naturally, whereas reading, while closely associated with speaking, is primarily a cultural invention of the last 6,000 years, which requires repetition and external motivation to master (Geary, 2008; Sweller, 2008).

When a child is taught how to read, neural networks that have evolved to specialise in language and visual recognition are repurposed for the process of reading and writing (Dehaene, 2010; Snow, 2021). Reading must be explicitly and systematically taught in a structured way.

The science of reading refers to a body of evidence that encompasses multidisciplinary knowledge from education, linguistics, cognitive psychology, special education and neuroscience.

The science of reading looks at the essential cognitive processes for competent reading and describes how reading develops in both typical and atypical readers. These studies have revealed a great deal about how we learn to read, what goes wrong when students don’t learn, and the instructional strategies that facilitate the cognitive processes required for reading (Castles et al., 2018; Ehri, 2005, 2014; Moats, 2020)

Oral language development

Oral language development in the pre-school years is the essential foundation of reading development. Oral language development comprises children's ability to use vocabulary and grammatically correct sentences when they speak, as well as receptive language (understanding what others are communicating). Oral language development is considered a biologically primary skill; however, children exposed to more complex oral language in the first 5 years of life will arrive at school with a wider vocabulary and more comprehensive ability than those who have not been so exposed (Snow, 2021). Where children start school with limited oral language, early intervention is essential for ensuring they catch-up with their more experienced peers.

The simple view of reading

The aim of learning to read is comprehension, or the capacity to extract meaning from print. Reading comprehension is largely the function of 2 broad skill sets, identified in the Simple View of Reading. These skills are word recognition and language comprehension.

Word recognition

Word recognition includes decoding and the capacity to recognise printed words. Decoding is the ability to identify letter–sound relationships and letter patterns to correctly pronounce what is being read. Decoding begins with early phonological awareness (the ability to identify and manipulate parts of spoken words – for example, to recognise rhyming words, identify syllables and segment a sentence), phonemic awareness (the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds [phonemes] in spoken words) and phonics (the development of letter–sound knowledge) (Buckingham, 2020).

Phonological awareness, phonemic awareness and phonics should be explicitly and directly taught in the early years of school to enable children to accurately sound out printed words. The active sounding out of words using letter–sounds knowledge is referred to as reading through the phonological pathway.

Beginning readers tend to rely on the phonological pathway to read words. Repeated decoding of an individual word over time causes that word to become retained in a reader’s long-term memory through a process that is known as orthographic mapping. This allows the reader to recognise the word automatically and read the word without needing to actively sound it out. Automatic recognition of words is called the lexical pathway for reading. It takes deliberate practise for children to build up enough words to read connected text with fluency. Skilled readers will primarily use the lexical pathway; however, they still use the phonological pathway if they come across an unfamiliar word.

Language comprehension

Language comprehension is the ability to derive meaning from spoken and written words. It consists of vocabulary, background knowledge and an understanding of how words are combined to form sentences. By upper primary and secondary school, most readers have been exposed to decoding, but issues with language comprehension commonly create barriers to being able to read at an appropriate level. Many words used in an academic context are not used in everyday speech and, as a result, must be explicitly taught.

The relationship between the 2 components is conceptualised in the Simple View of Reading as:

word recognition x language comprehension = reading comprehension

Importantly, the Simple View of Reading states that reading comprehension is a product of word identification ability and language comprehension. If either of these 2 factors is absent, the student will not demonstrate reading comprehension.

The 5 (or 6) keys to reading

Contemporary evidence identifies 5 specific sub-skills that are essential to the acquisition of word recognition and language comprehension. These are referred to as the ‘5 Big Ideas’ or the ‘5 Keys to Reading'(Five from Five, 2020). They are:

• phonemic awareness – the ability to identify and manipulate the individual speech sounds in words called phonemes
• phonics – knowledge of the relationships between letters and sounds, and the ability to use letter–sound relationships to decode words
• fluency – the ability to read accurately, quickly, and expressively. Fluent readers can focus on reading for meaning.
• vocabulary – knowledge of the meaning of words in isolation and in context
• comprehension – the ability to extract and construct meaning from written text.

Recent studies have also included oral language: the ability to understand and use vocabulary and produce sentences. The addition of oral language as a foundation for reading gives us a ‘Big 6’.

A more complex breakdown of reading is demonstrated in Scarborough’s Reading Rope (Scarborough, 2001), which illustrates the interconnectedness and interdependence of all the components of learning to read.

Reading in the secondary school context

The Simple View of Reading and the 5 Keys to Reading can also explain how reading develops for older students. Whilst early primary students tend to require more support in phonemic awareness and basic phonics (and oral language in the early years), secondary students tend to struggle more with fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. These skills are essential for reading to learn, a core aspect of students’ success in secondary school. Fluency, vocabulary and comprehension problems can be addressed through reading interventions, as well as the explicit teaching of subject-specific vocabulary and background knowledge. Poor fluency in adolescent readers can also be a function of poor decoding, especially of complex or multi-syllabic words, meaning phonics instruction can still be a core aspect of secondary school reading intervention (Five from Five 2020).

Current issues

Reading is a biologically secondary skill consisting of multiple cognitive functions, which must be taught systematically and through using evidence-based practices. Widespread adoption of reading approaches that lack strong scientific support has contributed to confusion around reading instruction (Bowen & Snow, 2017). A good example of this is the ‘multi-cueing’ (also known as ‘three-cueing’ and ‘searchlights’) approach used in early primary to teach novice readers to recognise unfamiliar words not through decoding, but through association with context or ‘cues’ in the text (Seidenberg, 2017; Snow, 2021). The origin of this model is not entirely clear, has not been linked to cognitive science, and the definition of the 3 cues (syntactic, semantic and grapho-phonic) varies between different versions of the model. As a result, the meaning and use of multi-cueing is open to many interpretations (Seidenberg, 2017; Snow, 2021). In Australia, approaches to teaching and assessing reading include many that aren't supported by the strongest evidence and don't adhere to the science of reading, which is a foundation for reading success.

Conclusion

Learning to read proficiently is critical to a student’s entire education and predictive of future education, health and employment outcomes. The 5 specific reading sub-skills of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension should be taught explicitly and systematically so all children become capable readers. Explicit teaching of these important skills is not yet consistently happening in Australian schools. It's important teachers and school leaders are supported to implement this evidence-based approach if all young Australians are to achieve the success in reading they deserve.”

References

Bowen, C., & Snow, P. (2017). Making sense of interventions for children with developmental disorders: A guide for parents and professionals. J & R Press.

Buckingham, J. (2020). Systematic phonics instruction belongs in evidence-based reading programs: A response to Bowers. The Educational and Developmental Psychologist, 37(2), 105–113. https://doi.org/10.1017/edp.2020.12

Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100618772271

Dehaene, S. (2010). Reading in the brain: The new science of how we read. Penguin Books.

Ehri, L. C. (2005). Learning to read words: Theory, findings, and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9(2), 167–188. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532799xssr0902_4

Ehri, L. C. (2014). Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Five from Five. (2020). Primary reading pledge: A plan to have all students reading by the end of primary school. MultiLit. https://fivefromfive.com.au/primary-reading-pledge

Geary, D. C. (2008). An evolutionarily informed education science. Educational Psychologist, 43(4), 179–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520802392133

Moats, L. C. (2020). Teaching reading is rocket science: What expert teachers of reading should know and be able to do. American Federation of Teachers. https://www.aft.org/ae/summer2020/moats

Scarborough, H. S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice. In S. Neuman & D. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook for research in early literacy (pp. 97–110). Guilford Press.

Seidenberg, M. (2017). Language at the speed of sight: How we read, why so many can't, and what can be done about it. Basic Books.

Snow, P. C. (2021). SOLAR: The science of language and reading. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 37(3), 222–233. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265659020947817

Sweller, J. (2008). Instructional implications of David C. Geary’s evolutionary educational psychology. Educational Psychologist, 43(4), 214–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520802392208

Chall on Stages of Reading Development

https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-15/chall-on-stages-of-reading-development

Noted early childhood education theorist Jeanne Chall lays out her stages of reading development.

“Stage 0. Prereading: Birth to Age 6. The Pre-reading Stage covers a greater period of time and probably covers a greater series of changes than any of the other stages (Bissex, 1980). From birth until the beginning of formal education, children living in a literate culture with an alphabetic writing system accumulate a fund of knowledge about letters, words, and books. The children grow in their control over various aspects of language—syntax and words. And they gain some insights into the nature of words: that some sound the same at their ends or beginnings (rhyme and alliteration), that they can be broken into parts, and that the parts can be put together (synthesized, blended) to form whole words.

Stage 1. Initial Reading, or Decoding, Stage: Grades 1-2, Ages 6-7. The essential aspect of Stage 1 is learning the arbitrary set of letters and associating these with the corresponding parts of spoken words. In this stage, children and adults interiorize cognitive knowledge about reading, such as what the letters are for, how to know that bun is not bug, and how to know when a mistake is made. This stage has been referred to pejoratively as a “guessing and memory game,” or as “grunting and groaning,” “mumbling and bumbling,” or “barking at print,” depending on whether the prevailing methodology for beginning reading instruction is a sight or a phonic approach. The qualitative change that occurs at the end of this stage is the insight gained about the nature of the spelling system of the particular alphabetic language used.

Stage 2. Confirmation, Fluency, Ungluing from Print: Grades 2-3, Ages 7-8.6. Essentially, reading in Stage 2 consolidates what was learned in Stage 1. Reading stories previously heard increases fluency. Stage 2 reading is not for gaining new information, but for confirming what is already known to the reader. Because the content of what is read is basically familiar, the reader can concentrate attention on the printed words, usually the most common, high-frequency words. And with the basic decoding skills and insights interiorized in Stage 1, the reader can take advantage of what is said in the story and book, matching it to his or her knowledge and language. Although some additional, more complex phonic elements and generalizations are learned during Stage 2 and even later, it appears that what most children learn in Stage 2 is to use their decoding language, and the redundancies of the stories read. They gain courage and skill in using context and thus gain fluency and speed.

Stage 3. Reading for Learning the New: A First Step. When readers enter Stage 3, they start on the long course of reading to “learn the new”—new knowledge, information, thoughts and experiences. Because their background (world) knowledge, vocabulary, and cognitive abilities are still limited at this stage, the first steps of Stage 3 reading are usually best developed with materials and purposes that are clear, within one viewpoint, and limited in technical complexities. This is in contrast to Stage 4 where multiplicity of views, complexity of language and ideas, as well as subtleties of interpretation are the expected.

Stage 4. Multiple Viewpoints: High School, Ages 14—18. The essential characteristic of reading in Stage 4 is that it involves dealing with more than one point of view. For example, in contrast to an elementary school textbook on American history, which presupposes Stage 3 reading, the textbook at the high-school level requires dealing with a variety of viewpoints. Compared to the textbooks in the lower grades, the increased weight and length of high-school texts no doubt can be accounted for by greater depth of treatment and greater variety in points of view. Stage 4 reading may essentially involve an ability to deal with layers of facts and concepts added on to those acquired earlier. These other viewpoints can be acquired, however, because the necessary knowledge was learned earlier. Without the basic knowledge acquired in Stage 3, reading materials with multiple viewpoints would be difficult.

Stage 5. Construction and Reconstruction—A World View: College, Age 18 and Above. When Stage 5 is reached, one has learned to read certain books and articles in the degree of detail and completeness that one needs for one’s purpose, starting at the end, the middle, or the beginning. A reader at Stage 5 knows what not to read, as well as what to read. To reach this stage is to be able to use selectively the printed material in those areas of knowledge central to one’s concern. Whether all people can reach Stage 5 reading, even at the end of four years of college, is open to study.”

Chall, Jeanne. (1983). Stages of Reading Development. New York: McGraw Hill. pp. 10-24. || Amazon || WorldCat

“The Stage Model of Reading Development describes the different stages children progress through as they learn to read. It outlines the skills and abilities they acquire at each stage, from pre-reading to becoming expert readers, according to a blog post by The Literacy Bug. This model helps educators understand how students learn to read and tailor their instruction accordingly. 

Here's a more detailed look at the stages:

1. Emergent Pre-reading (Birth to Age 6): This stage focuses on building foundational literacy skills like book awareness, understanding that books contain words and stories, and developing listening skills through being read to. Children may start to play with words, demonstrate book-handling skills, and begin to scribble. 

2. Early Reading (Ages 5-7): Children begin to learn to decode words and understand the relationship between sounds and letters (phonics). They may start to recognize sight words and develop basic comprehension skills. 

3. Transitional Reading (Ages 7-9): Students transition from learning to read to reading to learn. They become more fluent in their reading, improve their comprehension, and start exploring a wider range of reading materials. 

4. Intermediate Reading (Ages 9-12): This stage involves developing critical thinking skills, analyzing texts, and understanding different viewpoints. 

5. Expert Reading (Ages 16+): This stage involves reading for complex information, conducting research, and engaging in critical analysis of diverse texts. 

Other Models and Considerations:

• Ehri's Phases of Word Reading

describes word reading development in four phases: prealphabetic, early alphabetic, later alphabetic, and consolidated alphabetic. 

• The Simple View of Reading

suggests that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and language comprehension skills. 

• Modelled reading

(reading to or reading aloud) involves teachers modeling skilled reading behavior. 

• The Alphabetic Phase Theory

outlines four steps: pre-alphabetic, partial alphabetic, full alphabetic, and consolidated alphabetic.” 

AI responses

Stages of Reading Development

By: Pacific Resources for Education and Learning

Learn about the four stages of reading development that children move through as they progress from emergent to fluent readers. About Reading

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4.  Stages of Reading Development

“The Stages of Reading Development is a continuum that explains how students progress as readers. These stages are based on the students’ experience and not their age or grade level. Knowing these stages is helpful when developing materials for specific types of readers.

Emergent readers

Emergent readers need enriching and enjoyable experiences with books, especially picture books. Students can become comfortable with books even before they can read independently — recognizing letters and words and even language patterns. They are able to work with concepts of print and are at the beginning stages of developing the ability to focus attention on letter-sound relationships. Sharing books over and over, extending stories, relating experiences to both print and pictures, and guiding students to “read,” helps children begin to make predictions about what they are reading.

Early readers

Early readers are able to use several strategies to predict a word, often using pictures to confirm predictions. They can discuss the background of the story to better understand the actions in the story and the message the story carries. It is this time in the reader’s development that the cueing systems are called upon significantly, so they must pay close attention to the visual cues and language patterns, and read for meaning. It is a time when reading habits of risk-taking, and of predicting and confirming words while keeping the meaning in mind are established.

Transitional readers

Transitional readers often like to read books in a series as a comprehension strategy; the shared characters, settings, and events support their reading development. They read at a good pace; reading rate is one sign of a child’s over-all comprehension. At this stage, children generally have strategies to figure out most words but continue to need help with understanding increasingly more difficult text.

Fluent readers

Fluent readers are confident in their understandings of text and how text works, and they are reading independently. The teacher focuses on students’ competence in using strategies to integrate the cueing systems. Students are maintaining meaning through longer and more complex stretches of language. An effective reader has come to understand text as something that influences people’s ideas.”

Related Topics

About Reading, Comprehension, Developmental Milestones, Early Literacy Development, Fluency

Reading Rockets is made possible with generous support from the National Education Association.

https://www.readingrockets.org/people-and-organizations/pacific-resources-education-and-learning

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How a Stage Model Can Be Helpful in the Classroom:

A stage model of reading development can help educators understand the different phases students go through as they become proficient readers. This understanding allows teachers to better tailor instruction to meet the specific needs of individual students, rather than treating them as a homogenous group. 

• Differentiated Instruction:

By understanding the different stages of reading development, teachers can identify where a student is in their journey and provide instruction that is appropriate for their level.

• Choosing Appropriate Text Materials:

A stage model helps teachers select texts that are not too challenging or too easy for a student, but that offer the right level of support and engagement to help them progress to the next stage.

• Targeted Instruction:

Teachers can use the stage model to identify specific skills and strategies that students need to develop in order to move forward. For example, a student in the early stages might need extra support with decoding, while a student in later stages might need help with comprehension and critical thinking.

• Monitoring Progress:

A stage model can help teachers track students' progress and identify areas where they may need additional support.

• Providing Effective Feedback:

By understanding the stage model, teachers can provide more specific and helpful feedback to students about their reading. 

Key Stages of Reading Development (General Overview):

While specific stage models may vary, common stages include: 

1. 1. Emergent:

Students are just beginning to explore print and understand that reading is a meaningful activity.

2. 2. Early:

Students are learning to decode words and read simple texts.

3. 3. Transitional:

Students are becoming more fluent readers and are able to read a wider range of texts.

4. 4. Fluent:

Students can read fluently and with comprehension, and are able to engage with a wide range of texts.

In essence, a stage model provides a framework for understanding how students develop as readers. This framework can then be used to inform instruction, making it more effective and tailored to the needs of each individual student.”

AI response. 

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What is Guided Reading? - Fountas and Pinnell Blog (2019)

“Guided reading is a small-group instructional context in which a teacher supports each reader's development of systems of strategic actions for processing new texts at increasingly challenging levels of difficulty. During guided reading, students in a small-group setting individually read a text that you have selected at their instructional reading level. You provide teaching across the lesson to support students in building the in-the-head networks of strategic actions for processing increasingly challenging texts. Through guided reading, students learn how to engage in every facet of the reading process and apply that literacy power to all instructional contexts. 

Why is guided reading important? 

As an instructional context, guided reading:

• Supports readers in expanding their processing competencies (in-the-head systems of strategic actions)
• Provides a context for responsive teaching – teaching that is grounded in the teacher's detailed knowledge of and respect for each student, supporting the readers' active construction of a processing system
• Allows students to engage with a rich variety of texts
• Helps students learn to think like proficient readers
• Enables students to read more challenging texts with support.

"In guided reading, you meet students where they are and lead them forward with intention and precision." –Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell

What does guided reading look like?

A small group of students who are at a similar point in their reading development are seated across from you at a small kidney-shaped table. Each student reads, softly or silently, the same text individually. You guide a discussion of the text meaning and make teaching points based on your observations of the students' reading strengths and needs. 

Steps in the guided reading process:

1. Gather information about the readers to identify emphases.
2. Select and analyze texts to use.
3. Introduce the text.
4. Observe children as they read the text individually (support if needed).
5. Invite children to discuss the meaning of the text.
6. Make one or two teaching points.
7. Engage children in letter/word work activity.
8. Extend understanding through writing about reading (optional).
9. Reflect on the lesson and plan the following lesson.

Becoming an effective teacher of guided reading takes time and effort; but the benefits are worth it.

What is Guided Reading? - Fountas and Pinnell Blog (2019)

https://fpblog.fountasandpinnell.com/what-is-guided-reading

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And now over to my own document on this topic:

Hempenstall , K. (2004). How Might a Stage Model of Reading Development be Helpful in the Classroom? Educational Psychology, 24(6), 727–751.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233433176_How_Might_a_Stage_Model_of_Reading_Development_be_Helpful_in_the_Classroom

How Might a Stage Model of Reading Development be Helpful in the Classroom?

“The National Enquiry into the Teaching of Literacy is announcing findings that may directly and significantly influence how the teaching of reading is to occur in our schools in future. The changes will be nation-wide, and may involve a great deal of revised instructional practice. Teachers involved in literacy instruction have always been the major decision-makers about the methods of instruction and the curriculum materials to employ with their students, and about how to respond to their students’ efforts along the road to skilled reading. The Enquiry occurred because of concern that this grass roots approach may not have produced the best possible outcomes for all Australian students. Further, many teachers consider themselves ill-equipped by their teacher-training to make considered decisions in the best interests of all the students in their care.

Attention to the stages of reading development highlighted by current research can provide a valuable framework for teachers that enables the interpretation of student reading performance and consequent instruction appropriate to the needs of all students in their care. Over the years, a number of researchers have developed models of reading development based on stages (Chall, 1979; Ehri, 1993, 1994; Frith, 1985). Are they worth knowing about? Is the attainment of literacy somehow related to successful negotiation of these stages? Even if there is no consensus about whether or which stages are important, might the stage approach still provide useful information to guide intervention? Can student progress and success be hastened through such information? Alternatively, might it be that a focus upon stages merely reflects a kind of educational voyeurism with no implications for practice?

If this latter were the case, then the issues raised might be of academic interest but perhaps not assigned a high priority for curriculum attention.

Some have argued (e.g., Smith, 1973) that children have an innate propensity for reading, and require only a literate environment for reading to flourish. If this were true, then attention to stages would not have instructional consequences, nor any great appeal. However, it is now generally acknowledged that learning to read involves processes that are not equivalent to those involved in learning to speak (Liberman, 1997), and that it is, for too many children in our education system, a frustrating and fruitless pursuit.

The consequences for such children have been well documented. At the minimum, failure to read presents a major hurdle to educational progress (Binder, 1996; Lewis & Paik, 2001), a fast-acting self esteem depressant (Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow, 2000), and, in fact, is associated with every negative element of an individual’s life subsequently (National Institute for Literacy, 1998).

There Is a Problem

Research syntheses in recent years (National Reading Panel, 2000; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998) have produced considerable consensus concerning the variables critical in designing and presenting effective instruction to assist students become capable readers. Additionally, knowledge about early identification and intervention (Torgesen, 1998) holds promise of reducing the unacceptably high proportion of students who do not achieve adequately in school because of under-developed literacy skills.

In Australia, various incidence figures have been reported. For example, Marks and Ainley (1997) provided Australian ACER survey data indicating that 30% of Australian teenagers have “not attained mastery in the important area of reading” (p. 17). For disadvantaged children, that figure has been reported as about 60% (Orr, 1994). In a study of 3000 Australian students (Harrison, 2002), 30% of 9-year-olds did not display adequate letter-sound correspondence - a basic phonic skill. A similar proportion of children entering high school continued to display confusion between names and sounds.

More than 72% of children entering high school were unable to read phonetically regular three and four syllable words. In contrast, the official Australian figures reported in 2001 implicated about 19% of Year 3 children as failing to meet the national standards (Harrison, 2002). Similar concerns about national literacy levels have been expressed in Great Britain (Department for Education and Employment, 1998; 2002) and the USA (National Reading Panel, 2000).

The Role of Education

Whatever figure is accepted, it is apparent that it is beyond acceptability. There was a time when it was thought that teachers could have little impact upon student success. The Coleman Report (Coleman et al., 1966) and other studies deflated many in the educational community when they asserted that what occurred in schools could have little impact on student achievement. It was argued that the effects on educational outcomes of genetic inheritance, early childhood experiences and subsequent family environment vastly outweighed school effects (Jencks et al., 1972).

That being the case, there would be little point in stressing a particular approach to curriculum since the effects would be negligible compared to other variables outside a school’s control. In contrast to these perspectives, there is now a strong body of teacher effectiveness research, nicely exemplified in the Sanders and Rivers (1996) finding that students in classes with effective teachers for 3 years in a row achieved 50% more learning than those in classes with poor teachers over the same period. Further, the strongest benefit accrued to lower achieving students as teacher effectiveness increased. These advantages applied across diverse ethnic groups, and were cumulative. Students with similar abilities and initial skill levels attained very different educational outcomes depending upon the various teachers into whose charge they were placed.

There are now many studies that should direct our attention towards classroom instructional processes as a major variable impinging on student achievement. Based upon his analysis of empirical findings available since the 1970’s, Jencks has altered his earlier view, and now promotes the potential of education to significantly reduce inequality in student achievement (Jencks & Phillips, 1998). Wenglinsky (2003) reported a total standardized effect for teacher variables as 0.70, larger than the total standard effect of background measures (0.56).

In the area of reading, the high incidence of failure is now thought to be reducible to around 5% when empirically supported approaches are adopted from the beginning phase of school (Alexander, Entwisle, & Olsen, 1997; Fuchs & Fuchs, 2005: Torgesen et al., 2001; Torgesen, Wagner, Rashotte, Alexander, & Conway, 1997; Vellutino et al., 1996). It is also becoming clearer that the role of teachers in promoting reading development is undergoing a change of emphasis, although many teachers feel under-trained to manage the transition from a largely facilitating role to one of direct instructor (Carnine, 2000; Ingersoll, 1999; Moats, 1994).

This pessimism is not unreasonable, given the incidence figures above, and the finding (Hill, 1995) that, in Victoria, the lowest 10% of students make no discernible reading progress between Year 4 and Year 10. A national survey of 1000 teachers by Rohl and Greaves (2005) adds to this concern, reporting that 36% of beginning primary teachers felt unprepared to teach reading.

Senior staff at their schools were even more pessimistic, considering that 49% of these beginning teachers were unprepared to teach reading. These figures rose dramatically (77% - 89%) when the beginning teachers were confronted with diverse learners (those with disabilities or learning difficulties, indigenous and low SES students, and students whose initial language was not English).  Research Can Provide Direction So, there is a systemic problem, evidence that it is largely resolvable, and a first line of attack (the school system) that is inadequately prepared for its role.

The crucial weakness in the system arises due to a lack of focus upon the vital aspects of beginning literacy instruction. Education has a long history of responding enthusiastically to gurus, fads, and philosophies whilst ignoring or decrying research-based methods and their findings (Hempenstall, 1997). Times are changing, however. For example, in the USA there has a strong top-down initiative (Reading First) toward increased adoption of those literacy programs having evidence of effectiveness. This process of tying funding to instructional method has been resisted strenuously by many teachers, some of their organisations, and the teacher training facilities (Manzo, 2002), though compliance is on the increase.

Recent evidence suggests the initiative is reaping rewards. For example, the National Center for Education Statistics (2005) reported that for nine-year-olds, the average reading score was higher in 2004 than in any previous assessment year since data was first obtained in 1971. Additionally, an Institute of Education Sciences (Stone, 2002) has been created in an attempt to increase the scientific rigour of the research that will inform future education policy decisions.

Perhaps, the dreaded educational pendulum’s swing will been attenuated as a consequence. Systematic synthetic phonics instruction has been espoused as useful for most beginning students by a number of august panels recently (National Reading Panel, 2000; Snow, Burns, & Griff n, 1998) in addition to similar conclusions having been reached by many individual researchers (Baker, Kameenui, Simmons, & Stahl, 1994; Bateman, 1991; Blachman, 1991; Felton & Pepper, 1995; Foorman, 1995; Foorman, Francis, Beeler, Winikates, & Fletcher, 1997; Moats, 1994; Simmons, Gunn, Smith, & Kameenui, 1995; Singh, Deitz, & Singh, 1992; Spector, 1995; Tunmer & Hoover, 1993; Weir, 1990). This approach recognises the demands of mastering an alphabetically-based writing system, and initially focuses upon teaching the sounds employed in words, their corresponding graphemes, and the processes of blending and segmenting. There are different approaches to teaching phonics that influence what is taught: analytic and synthetic phonics instruction, and how it is taught: systematic and incidental.

In a synthetic (or explicit) program, students will learn the associations between the letters and their sounds. This may comprise showing students the graphemes and teaching them the sounds that correspond to them, as in “This letter you are looking at makes the sound sss”. Alternatively, some teachers prefer teaching students single sounds fi rst, and then later introducing the visual cue (the grapheme) for the sound, as in “We’ve been practising the mmm sound, and here’s the letter used in writing that tells us to make that sound”.

In a synthetic program, the processes of blending (“What word do these sounds make when we put them together mmm-aaa-nnn?”), and segmenting (“Sound out this word for me”) are also taught. It is of little value knowing what are the building blocks of our language’s structure if one does not know how to put those blocks together appropriately to allow written communication, or to separate the blocks to enable decoding of a letter grouping. After letter-sound correspondence has been taught, phonograms (such as: er, ir, ur, wor, ear, sh, ee, th) are introduced, and more complex words can be introduced into reading activities. In conjunction with this approach “controlled vocabulary” stories may be used - books using only words decodable using the students’ current knowledge base. The term “synthetic” is often used synonymously with “explicit” because it implies the synthesis (or building up) of phonic skills from their smallest unit (graphemes). One alternative phonics model is known as analytic phonics. “Analytic” is used synonymously with “implicit” because it signifies the analysis (breaking down) of the whole word to its parts (an analysis only necessary when a child cannot read it as a whole word). In analytic phonics, students are expected to absorb or induce the required information from the word’s structure, largely from presentation of similar sounding words.

For example, “The first sound you are seeking also occurs in these words: mad, muscle, moon”. The words may be pointed to, or spoken by the teacher, but the sounds in isolation from words are never presented to children. A major problem with implicit phonics methods is the assumption that all students will already have the fairly sophisticated phonemic awareness skills needed to enable the comparison of sounds within the various words.

An additional problem with most implicit phonics approaches are that children are provided with a variety of books correlated with their interest rather than with their skill level. They are encouraged as a first strategy to use the pictures and context of the stories to predict words, rather than employing the words’ alphabetic makeup (Johnston & Watson, 2003). This Three Cueing system has been criticised as inconsistent with what is known about skilled reading development (Hempenstall, 2003). The synthetic approach has been exciting much interest in Great Britain due to some very powerful and long-lasting effects reported from Clackmannanshire in Scotland (Johnston & Watson, 2003; Watson & Johnston, 1998). Three hundred Scottish school beginners were taught by either synthetic or analytic phonics programs over an intensive 16-week period at school commencement. Those who were taught by the synthetic phonics method were seven months above their chronological age and similarly advanced beyond their analytically taught peers. Seven years later the synthetic group’s word-reading ability was three-and-a-half years advanced, and almost two years ahead in spelling, and disadvantaged children achieved similar progress. Unaccountably, the progress of boys exceeded that of girls (by 11 months), and only 5.6% of the students taught synthetic phonics were behind in word reading at the five year follow-up.

There are also two approaches to the instructional process (as opposed to the instructional content), “systematic” and “incidental”. In systematic instruction, there will be attention to the detail of the teaching process. Instruction will usually be teacher-directed, based on a logical analysis of the skills required and their optimal presentation sequence. At its most systematic, it will probably involve massed and spaced practice of those skills (often isolated from text), corrective feedback of errors, and continuous evaluation of progress. Incidental (or discovery, or embedded) instruction shifts the responsibility for making use of phonic cues from the teacher to the student. It assumes that students will develop a self-sustaining, natural, unique reading style that integrates the use of contextual and graphophonic cues, without the need for systematic instruction.

According to the research consensus, there are compelling theoretical and empirical reasons why teaching phonics to students in this systematic synthetic manner produces greater success than do the less directive approaches popular over the past 20 years. A theoretical rationale indicates whether, given the state of knowledge at the time, it is reasonable for a model to be successful. An empirical rationale indicates whether a particular approach is indeed successful.

Though many of the major whole language advocates were disparaging of the role of phonics in learning to read (Goodman, 1974, 1985; Smith, 1973; Weaver, 1988), there has been an apparent renewed interest in the potential of phonics instruction to provide some assistance to beginning readers. The approach that maintains most of the whole language philosophy with a sprinkling of phonics is often described as a “balanced approach” (Moats, 2000). Whether teachers have been adequately trained to optimally balance such unusual bedfellows as whole language and phonics was addressed in the Rohl and Greaves (2005) nation-wide survey.

About 57% of beginning teachers felt unprepared to teach phonics, and experienced teachers at their schools considered that 65% of them were unprepared. Attendance to the stage model is of particular assistance in enhancing one’s theoretical understanding of the reading process, thereby also supplying appropriate emphases for instruction at various phases of a student’s progress. Reading Stages Although variations in emphasis occur among reading stage writers, there is increasing general acceptance that the sequence of development of the word identification system moves from logographic to alphabetic to orthographic (Moats, 1998). Beginners attend to a word as they would a picture or logograph. The letters are not recognised other than as they contribute to the landscape. As they become familiar with letters readers begin to use their sound values as important cues in discerning words; hence, the alphabet assumes significance. With experience, the capacity to attend to individual letters and groupings of letters expands to enable rapid recognition of whole words (orthographic recognition). It should not be assumed that these stages are rigid dichotomies.

Stage achievement may be fluid – a new stage only achieved temporarily. They may be hard won or achieved rapidly and effortlessly in an “Aha” manner. Some students reach school already at the relatively advanced alphabetic stage because they have taken advantage of a wide range of literacy experiences already experienced (Adams, 1990). Instructional planning for students’ future reading progress may be enhanced by assessing their current status within the reading stage hierarchy. Action may be then initiated to provide appropriate instruction to accelerate movement to the next stage. Perhaps, the most valuable aspect of the stage approach is its capacity to sensitise teachers to the early detection of delayed progress, thereby avoiding the debilitating Matthew Effects. The Consequences of Slow Initial Progress Stanovich (1986) uses the label Matthew effects (after the Gospel according to St. Matthew) to describe how, in reading, the rich become richer and the poor become poorer.

Children with a good understanding of how spoken words are composed of sounds (phonemic awareness) are well placed to make sense of our alphabetic system. Their typically rapid development of spelling-to-sound correspondences allows the development of independent reading, high levels of practice, and the subsequent fluency that is critical for comprehension and enjoyment of reading.

On the other hand, students without either phonemic awareness developed prior to school entry or appropriate instruction in the beginning stages of reading are likely to commence a downward spiral of lesser achievement across the curriculum. Contrary to the hope that initial slow progress is merely a maturational lag to be redressed by a developmental spurt at some later date, typically even relatively minor delays tend to become increasingly major over time (Stanovich, 1993). A study by Juel (1988) reported a probability that a poor reader in Year 1 would still be so classified in Year 4 was 0.88. Jorm, Share, Maclean, and Matthews (1984) in their longitudinal study noted similar outcomes. A performance difference in reading of 4 months in Year 1 had increased to 9 months in Year 2 in favour of the phonemically aware group (who had been matched in kindergarten on verbal IQ and sight word reading), over a low phonemic awareness group.

How These Stages are Delineated

In the first logographic stage, children begin to recognise writing by attending to extraneous cues (Ehri, 1994) such as colour, size, location, and accompanying logos on advertising signs, for example, that for McDonalds food outlets. When they later begin to attend to the words themselves, the young readers begin to recognise some visual letter patterns by their shape (a landscape of squiggles). The shape is recognised largely as a whole, and significant alterations to the letter structure may be made without altering the child’s response (e.g., a change in the McDonalds’ sign to McPomalds is unnoticed). In some students, unawareness of the alphabetic nature of our written language can be gauged by their attention to unproductive cues, such as assuming that length must be related to an object’s size. Using this faulty guide, the beginner may determine which of two given words must represent “elephant” and which must then be “bee”.

Alternatively, the solution to word identification difficulty may be sought in extraneous visual cues within a word’s structure, such as the “g” in “dog” being interpreted as a tail, or the “oo” in “look” interpreted as eyes. Even though these strategies are moribund, their use nevertheless represents an advance over the earlier purely logographic recognition strategy. It is a more analytic approach – attention being paid to word sub-parts, though the attention is not alphabetic in nature - nor (as yet) is it directed to the word sub-parts’ position within the word.

Instruction That Hinders Progress

Students grasping for some means to make sense of the squiggles may attempt to predict upcoming words by second-guessing the author. Systematic teachers can readily recognise this semantic strategy and demonstrate to students its lack of utility. A student’s lack of alphabetic awareness may be detected when responding inappropriately to the teacher substitution of similar looking but semantically different words in a sentence (e.g., replacing “dog” with “log”, “hook” with “book”).

Of course, some teachers are driven by the belief that students should rely primarily upon prediction strategies (Emmit, 1996; Weaver, 1988). They are less likely to be concerned about the non-alphabetic strategy in use, and more likely to suggest that the student attend to the picture that accompanies the text.

This is generally an unhelpful suggestion as there is no word-level learning involved - the reading task is merely delayed or bypassed. They may also persuade their students to focus upon meaning cues rather than word-level cues, based upon a misplaced faith in miscue analysis and its underlying assumptions (Hempenstall, 1998).

However, it is now recognised that errors that retain meaning, but not word structure, are not associated with efficient decoding and, hence, not to be encouraged (Savage, Stuart, & Hill, 2001). Some teachers remain unaware that the use of context as a strategy to recognize words is ineffective (Kamhi & Catts, 1999). Context, as an cue to word recognition, is of only minor benefit even with non-content words, enabling only 40% comprehension at best (Stanovich, 1990). In a study by Gough, Alford, and Holley-Wilcox (1981), well educated, skilled readers, given adequate time, could correctly ascertain from context only one word in four. As for content words, only 10% are recognizable from context (Gough & Wren, 1998). This figure is lower because content words carry a great deal of the meaning in a sentence, and are less likely to be defined within the surrounding text. Comprehension suffers further when reliance on context is promoted (Bruck, 1990), because significant working memory resources need be devoted to predicting and confirming words from context, thereby unnecessarily diverting the resources otherwise available for comprehension.

Using context as a major strategy in recognising words should be discouraged. It is a characteristic of beginning and struggling readers, not of skilled readers (Alexander, 1998; Nicholson, 1991), and its use does not assist comprehension development. Indeed, a study by Shankweiler et al. (1999) noted that it is the ability to read aloud a list of English words that is most strongly associated with comprehension - accounting for 79% of the variance in reading comprehension.

Phonemic Awareness

At this early stage, the child, has not learned to analyse the written word structure, and nor would it be necessary if our written language were logographic, as is Chinese (for the most part). English is alphabetic, and contains far too many words to be recognised by the visual pattern of peaks and troughs, whirls and intersections that comprise written English.

The movement to the alphabetic stage is probably provoked by the gradual awareness of speech segmentation that the child induces or is taught (Adams, 1990). Phoneme awareness may more readily be established in children whose earlier experiences have included a focus on the structure of the spoken word, even if in larger units such as rhymes and syllables.

Some children arrive at school quite alert to the sounds in words, whilst others have not, and further, some of them will not develop this awareness unaided (Chall, 1989). Without some assistance in developing phonemic awareness, they may never appreciate how the structure of spoken words forms the foundation for decoding written words. For many of these phonological novices, drawing attention to spoken word parts through rhymes, and other game-like activities can be sufficient to create awareness. Those who do not readily progress should be targeted for more intensive assistance, as difficulty with phonological awareness development is a strong predictor of reading problems (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Share, 1995). Advancing beyond simple sensitivity to sounds, the more sophisticated phonological skills that involve sound manipulation, such as blending and segmenting, are best taught to ensure that the alphabetic principle becomes the wellspring of subsequent reading development (National Reading Panel, 2000).

Phonemic Awareness and the Alphabetic Stage

An interesting question involves how best to ensure that phonemic awareness develops into alphabetic insight. Is it necessary to teach phonemic awareness before introducing letters? Or is it more efficient (and as effective) to combine letter-sound correspondences with phonemic awareness activities? Ehri et al. (2001) noted in their review that it was more beneficial to teach segmenting and blending rather than the full range of phonemic awareness activities, and to combine such activities with beginning reading, that is, through employing letters. Hatcher, Hulme, and Ellis (1994) describe the process as creating a “phonological linkage” (p. 42), and further support for this position is supplied by Spector (1995) and in the report of the National Reading Panel (2000).

Children in dual-input programs have demonstrated more improvement in reading and spelling than have those exposed to oral phonemic awareness programs divorced from reading instruction. Presumably, the reason for this advantage lies with the manner in which phonemic awareness provides a signpost to beginning readers that there is a logic to the reading process (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989), and it is more effective when this signpost occurs in proximity to its primary function – that of enhancing reading development. It has even been argued (Ehri, 1998; Morais, Alegria, & Content, 1987) that it is not until students appreciate how our alphabet is designed to represent speech in phonemic form that more sophisticated levels of phonemic awareness result.

Those who develop an appreciation for the alphabetic principle recognise that spoken words are amalgams of separate sounds, and that each of these sounds has been assigned at least one written symbol. In its simplest form, alphabetically-based reading requires blending of the sounds represented by these symbols to at least approximate a word’s pronunciation, and spelling involves segmenting the word into its constituent sounds and writing the associated symbols. Unless the alphabetic principle is understood, the beginner will remain at the logographic stage - reliant on memory of the letter landscapes, supplemented with contextual guessing strategies (Spear-Swerling & Sternberg, 1994).

Such readers are doomed, as eventually (sometimes not until middle to upper primary school) the demands on visual memory of a rapidly increasing vocabulary become overwhelming - a challenge that has been described as an “orthographic avalanche” (Share & Stanovich, 1995, p. 17).

Whereas, some students appear to grasp the alphabetic concept readily, many require detailed and multiple teaching sequences before achieving this crucial understanding (National Reading Panel, 2000).

It should be remembered that our form of written language is one of the greatest of human inventions. It is not an intuitively obvious system, but arcane and ingenious. Without clear instructional guidance, many students will imagine that memory and contextual strategies provide the only access to reading prowess. Alphabetic written languages are relatively rare in the world compared with the number of spoken languages, and their stunning achievement is to enable the visual representation of all of a culture’s oral language in a structure that is decodable by almost all of its citizens.

In contrast, written Chinese comprises about 40,000 logograms, yet Chinese adults are said to have a working familiarity with only about 4000-5000 of them (Adams, 1990). This number presumably approaches the limits of visual memory for shapes.

By Year 3, a Japanese student of Kanji has been taught about 1000 ideograms (Beck & Juel, 1992). Yet, the normally developing Year 3 reader is able to read 80,000 English words (Adams, 1990), because the written form comprises a relatively small number of working parts.

The demands remain within the memory capacity if the alphabetic principle underpinning the construction of the written language is understood, and learners do not attempt to recognise words as unique entities. Immature sight reading, as opposed to the mature (orthographic) sight reading characteristic of the skilled reader, is not alphabetic in nature, and should provide the cue for teachers to avoid engaging students in memorising word lists, or intensively using flashcards at this time. It is intuitively attractive to promote the memorisation of common words in initial reading instruction.

After all, initial texts contain many common words, the pictorial recognition of which can engage students in the process. In fact, only 300 words form 75% of the words that children typically employ in their writing (Croft, 1997). Immature sight reading enables beginners the illusion that they are genuinely reading, and the teacher belief may be that real reading will follow because the beginning reader’s interest has been piqued.

Whilst having children memorise common irregular irregular words may not be harmful, there is the risk in a strong initial “look-say” focus (such as in memorising Dolch lists) that beginners will be distracted from an appreciation of the alphabetic principle. In the early alphabetic stage, simple letter pattern-to-sound conversion begins to provide a means of decoding unknown words, though the process is necessarily laborious (as is any new skill prior to its automatization). Initially, this may involve use of only partial letter sound cues (Spear-Swerling & Sternberg, 1994) often accompanied by attention to other supports such as those provided by pictures. So a student aware of the correspondence between the letter “d” and the sound /d/ is more likely to pronounce the written word “dog” as “dog” than as “puppy”, particularly when a picture would allow for either response. With the arrival of alphabetic insight (Byrne, 1991), this decoding strategy becomes reliable, at least with regular words. The necessary stage of practising sounding-out is, however, a fragile one.

Successful experiences help cement the process, but they are more likely to eventuate when teachers ensure that students are not flooded with inconsiderate (for example, authentic) text, containing varying proportions of irregular words. The sounding-out strategy is a prerequisite for skilled reading, but does not itself constitute skilled reading. Irregular words are a different hurdle, one best addressed without undermining the student’s willingness to decode.

When authentic text is the major source of reading material, students are likely to become confused by the range of irregular words, and attracted towards a faster (if unreliable) guessing approach. Authentic text, if well written, promotes engagement with readers. However, its attraction is based upon the premise that reading will proceed naturally and effortlessly simply because the prose is engaging. It is part of the discredited reading-isas-natural-as-speech proposition.

As authentic text has the potential to hinder progress, its motivational benefits as the major source of beginner texts may be outweighed by its costs. It is intuitively persuasive that this whole process can be made more efficient and effective when controlled vocabulary is employed in the early stages. Students are more likely to persevere with a reading strategy when it is highly successful (Juel, 1996), and there is some evidence that decodable text enhances this process of appropriate strategy adoption (Juel & Roper-Schneider, 1985), though another study was unable to show the same benefits (Jenkins, Peyton, Sanders, & Vadasy, 2004).

If uncontrolled text is a major element of the student’s reading diet, some students may become disheartened with the difficulties wrought by the number of irregular words encountered. Uncontrolled or inconsiderate text for a beginning reader is analogous to teaching a beginning swimmer in rough surf.

Learning and practising the new skill to fluency in the calm of a pool is more likely to produce eventual surf swimming success than is overwhelming the young swimmer with multiple challenges from the outset. Of course, decoding strategies continue to provide some clues for irregular words (Goulandris & Snowling, 1995). In such words, it is vowels that provide the quality of irregularity, but consonants remain regular for the most part, and it is the consonants that are most important in word recognition (Share & Stanovich, 1995).

Hence, the phonological recoding strategy at least enables partial cues to assist the decoding of most words along the regular-irregular continuum. It is not be possible to explain skilled reading in terms of such a slow fragmented system of decoding words letter by letter. The next level involves the recognition of parts of words. Reading individual words becomes faster as groups of letters begin to be recognised as single units, thereby reducing the sounding-out and blending demands.

It also enables the further regularisation of our eclectic language, because many of these word parts have similar pronunciation across a wide range of words (e.g., “igh”, “ain”). Since many different words share similar spelling patterns, practice on any one word may simultaneously enhance the recognition of other similar words. The practice of this technique assists consolidation of the alphabetic principle, and makes multi-syllabic words less daunting. The facility, sometimes known as decoding-by-analogy, may provide a partial explanation for the speed with which avid readers develop their reading vocabulary. It should be noted, however, that very young students may not benefit from a strong emphasis on analogy training.

Nation, Allen, and Hulme (2001) found that, at least for 6-year-olds, children did not perceive the orthographic similarities across similar words, but instead relied upon phonological priming. They only derived benefit when they could hear a ‘clue word’ pronounced by an adult. Given the uncertainty about the research into decoding by analogy, it may be prudent to emphasise the mastery of basic decoding skills in the beginning stages of reading acquisition, and emphasise analogies later on.

Orthographic Stage

There are far too many words in our written language to be learned through direct teaching, and at some point it is necessary for students to realise their capacity to teach themselves the pronunciations of new words. The alphabetic period is crucial for the rise of self-teaching (Share, 1995), as students begin to appreciate that every time they decode an unfamiliar word it subsequently becomes easier and faster to do so. In fact, this practice enables them to become adept at storing letter-patterns – orthographic information that can dramatically hasten word recognition (Torgesen, 1998). As they read the same words repeatedly, the spellings of the words become amalgamated or bonded to syntactic, semantic and phonological identities already stored in memory.

When readers see words that they have learned in this way, they read them not by guessing or sounding out, but rather by accessing the amalgams in memory. … sounding out strategies are used mainly to read unfamiliar words (Ehri, 1998, p.100). This gradual “lexicalization” (Share & Stanovich, 1995, p. 18) occurs through repeated opportunities to use letter-sound correspondences for decoding. The original decoding strategy is used with less frequency as the range of familiar word patterns increases through this self-teaching mechanism. The phonological recoding strategy remains useful for decoding unfamiliar words - and our language has many low frequency words.

Eighty percent of English words have a frequency of less than one in a million (Carroll, Davies, & Richman, 1971, cited in Share & Stanovich, 1995). Thus, the phonological recoding mechanism has a usefulness that survives beyond its initial ability to provide the opportunities for the formation of orthographic representations. Even in adults, this ability to decode unfamiliar words is a hallmark of skilled reading, and continues to be of significance.

One example of its value occurs when individuals are faced with a new technical vocabulary related to their occupation or interests. Even bright well-compensated adults with dyslexia (whose primary difficulty is in decoding) find it distressing that they need to laboriously remember word shapes, constantly battle with new words, and have very little idea how to spell (Greenberg, Ehri, & Perin, 1997).

A crucial and often misunderstood requirement for skilled reading is that the sought-after orthographic strategies can only be developed through multiple examples of success in decoding phonologically (Ehri, 1998, Share & Stanovich, 1995). Thus, it does matter how children read. Some research using brain imaging techniques (Joseph, Noble, & Eden, 2001; Pugh et al., 2002) has added to our understanding of this link.

It appears that the left brain’s parieto-temporal region is employed in decoding (sounding out), and in good readers this area is very active during reading. In struggling readers there is little activity in the left hemisphere, but considerably more in the right hemisphere. When beginning readers have decoded a word correctly a number of times, they develop a neural model that is an exact replica of the printed word, reflecting the word’s pronunciation, spelling, and meaning.

This internal representation is maintained in the occipitotemporal region of the left hemisphere. Subsequent recognition of that word becomes automatic, taking less than 150 milliseconds (less than a heartbeat). It is the key to fluent reading. However, the occipito-temporal region does not become available without building up the parieto-temporal region.

On average, from 4-14 accurate sounding-outs (Apel & Swank, 1999) will create the fi rm links necessary; although some children may require many times that number (Lyon, 2001; Swanson, 2001) to facilitate the growth of connections between those regions. Not all children have a strong phonological talent, and there may be both genetic and environmental influences on in these individual differences. Those who continue to struggle to read do not use the same brain regions for reading. Instead, they create an alternate neural pathway, reading mostly with regions on the right side of the brain - areas not well suited for reading. However, all is not lost as the brain’s plasticity enables it to respond to a remedial environment to establish the appropriate connections (Halfon, Schulman, & Hochstein, 2001).

In a Shaywitz et al. (2004) intervention, it was revealed that the appropriate left hemisphere regions can be stimulated into activity through the use of systematic synthetic phonics instruction. Increased fluency, accuracy and comprehension were noted in the intervention group at post-test and at one year later. Additionally, the occipitotemporal region continued to develop 1 year after the intervention had ended.

So, it is the practice at sounding-out a word that gradually causes an imprint of that word (or word segment) in the memory, not the vague instruction to “remember this word - picture it”. This imprint is not of a diffuse word shape - but of a letter sequence that becomes recognisable as quickly as would a letter or two when one is reading. The position of the letters is as firmly entrenched as are the actual letters themselves.

It is why proofreading is possible for good alphabetic readers, why a misspelling stands out so clearly. Savage, Stuart, and Hill (2001) found, through reading-error analysis, that the more attention young readers paid to all the letters and their position in words at age 6, the more advanced they were in reading by age 8.

Those young readers whose errors may have retained meaning, but not initial and fi nal phonemes (for example, saying “people” for “crowd”), were not among those making good progress. This is an important issue as some have argued that comprehension occurs prior to word recognition (Goodman, 1985), and if that were so then word level processes would be of minimal importance. Teaching practices hinge upon this issue, so it does require careful consideration.

Macmillan (2002) summarizes the results of eye movement and brain research studies: Semantic processing occurs last (e.g. Lee, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 1999; Perry & Ziegler, 2002; Sereno, Rayner, & Posner, 1998). As readers become more adept, instead of letter-by-letter symbol-to-sound translation occurring in a series, it has been shown that this process speeds up, and gradually groups of letters, common spelling patterns, and high frequency words begin to be recognised all at once, in parallel (Aghababian & Nazir, 2000; Jared, Levy, & Rayner, 1999) (p.13).

The developing students become more and more sensitised to letters and their position rather than to a vague word picture. Thus, word analysis is a precursor to recognising words instantly as a whole. Only by understanding the details of word construction can they take in the larger unit of the whole word – orthographic processing. If prompted, they begin by noticing sub-word units like syllables and become aware that those syllables occur in other words too, and have (in most cases) the same sound value. When they have a store of such subword units, and the sounding-out skills - they have grounds for confidence in addressing words not before seen (Ehri, 1997).

To see a student, who previously baulked at novel words, now attack them with gusto is a heart-warming outcome of effective teaching of word structure and blending/segmenting. The task of reading no longer appears arcane, but rather a game - the rules of which are being rapidly mastered. Success in employing these tools to decode new words is what self-teaching entails, and the discovery process further expands the range of sub-word units able to be brought to bear on increasingly difficult words. Fluency The crawling-before-walking dictum can be bemusing to those who consider that beginners should be encouraged to read in the way that skilled readers do (Goodman, 1973, 1974).

However, and analogous to many other life skills, to ensure that students develop instantaneous word recognition, teachers must first emphasise the minutiae of decoding, and ensure that all students obtain their requisite levels of practice to enable the achievement of that most important quality, automaticity. It is a state of skill development in which tasks that formerly required concentration to complete competently, having been practised to the point of over-learning, are now able to be completed without conscious attention (Baker, Kame’enui, Simmons, & Stahl, 1994; Thompson & Nicholson, 1998).

All readers have a limited amount of attentional capacity to devote to the reading task. If the basic process of extracting the words from the page is laboured (slow and usually error-prone), readers will lose track of that which already has been read (Mastropieri, Leinart, & Scruggs, 1999), and be unable to follow the text’s sequence of ideas (Kamhi & Catts, 1999). They will also remain essentially passive during the reading task, not able to bring their own experiences to bear on the all-important meaning-making process, and hence their comprehension is doubly hindered. Because of the additional effort required, they are likely to be reading less than their peers and their resultant slower vocabulary development further impedes comprehension (Mastropieri et al., 1999).

Sometimes these struggling readers are exhorted to pay more attention to meaning (Newman, 1985) than to the words in front of them - a cruel, if unintentionally so, diversion away from the problem source. With automaticity, all available attention can be directed to the meaning-making task, because the lower-level decoding process is effortless.

Unsurprisingly then, research has shown that fluency and comprehension are mutually interdependent (Mathes, Howard, Allen, & Fuchs, 1998). Some students who have reached the stage of reading grade level materials with accuracy may continue to be characterized by a slow and halting style, read without expression, and despite their excellent word recognition accuracy, comprehension may be compromised. Hence, as reading accuracy becomes facile, the role of reading speed assumes greater importance. For some students, fluency (speed combined with accuracy) may develop simply from practice at reading, but can be enhanced when students’ attention is drawn to the goal of increasing their reading speed.

The greater the volume of appropriately constructed text read at a student’s independent reading level (95% accuracy), the more rapidly fluency is likely to develop (Lyon, 1998). Students whose fluency does not develop normally may require significant additional support, a circumstance easily overlooked unless regular fluency checks are an element in the reading program.

Various methods have been employed to assist fluency further, including repeated reading, speed drills, computer-guided practice, and rapid word recognition charts (Mather & Goldstein, 2001). The general intention is to assist students to realise the value of more fluent reading, and to provide regular opportunities for them to test and chart their developing rate and accuracy. There has been ample research demonstrating that the number of words students read correctly in 1 minute provides a reliable and valid measure of overall reading ability (Baker, Gersten, & Keating, 2000). While suggested rates vary, Howell and Nolet (2000) recommend the following benchmarks. From early Year 1 to late Year 1, the anticipated progression is from 35 - 50 words correct per minute:

Whilst from early Year 2 to Late Year 2, the target is from 70 - 100 correct wpm;

From early Year 3 to late Year 3 the progression is from 120 - 140 correct wpm.

A slightly different trajectory is suggested by Binder, Haughton, and Bateman (2002).

They anticipate a more rapid progression throughout Year 1 reaching between 60 - 100 correct wpm.

They also provide additional yearly expectations: Year 2 – Year 3 100 - 120 correct wpm,

Year 4 - Year 5 120 – 150 correct wpm,

Year 6 - Year 8 150 – 180 correct wpm, and

Year 9 and above 180 – 200 correct wpm.

When the author was working in a Florida school in 2004, there was consternation about a new state 3rd Year reading comprehension test, known as the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT).

The alarming new mandate was that any student failing this test could not progress to Year 4, an eventuality that tended to attract schools’ attention and efforts. It was discovered that 91% of students who read at or above 110 correct words per minute on grade level text achieved adequate performance on the reading section of the FCAT.

Of students reading below 80 correct words per minute, 81% failed the FCAT (Buck & Torgesen, 2003). Fluency suddenly became a fi rm focus for identifying at risk students and as a focus for intervention. Similar findings with respect to oral reading fluency and state reading tests have been reported in Michigan (Carlisle, Schilling, Scott, & Zeng, 2004) and North Carolina (Barger, 2003) Reading Fluency is Amenable to Intervention

Students who seriously struggle with reading may have a developmental reading trajectory as little as half that of the average student (Wheldall & Beaman, 2000). This difficulty is clearly reflected in their fluency rates, and in the stagnation of those rates over time. In a 2 year study of 3000 students, Fuchs, Fuchs, Hamlett, Walz, and Germann (1993) found, with an effective reading program, that students in Year 1 to Year 3 should improve their fluency by two correct words per minute per week of instruction, whilst those in Year 4 to Year 6 should improve by one correct word per minute per week of instruction.

This study did not focus upon low progress readers, and an important issue is the degree to which such readers can also display progress in fluency. There are fluency-based instructional programs that have produced strong gains in programs for students diagnosed with learning difficulties (Johnson and Layng, 1992).

The one correct word per minute per week of instruction figure was exceeded in the Wheldall and Beaman (2000) evaluation of the Making Up Lost Time In Literacy (MULTILIT) program for students from Year 3 to Year 6. An increase of 38 words per minute was attained by low progress readers after two school terms of intensive, systematic, direct instruction that emphasised phonological decoding skills, word recognition and supported text reading.

Wheldall and Beaman argue that a reasonable target for low progress readers, when provided with effective remedial instruction, is a rate of 135 wpm corresponding to a mid Year 5 level, an attainment they consider represents functional literacy. Both standardized and informal assessments of oral reading accuracy, rate and comprehension are recommended and referenced in the National Reading Panel Report (National Reading Panel, 2000).

The Report recommends guided oral reading as a valuable fluency enhancing activity, yet both fluency assessment and instruction are notably absent from the reading curricula of many schools. Perhaps this is unsurprising given that reading fluency is not mentioned in the English curriculum standards documents from at least three Australian states: Victoria, South Australia, and Queensland (Department of Education, Employment & Training, 2001).

Teaching approaches that include a fluency component, such as MULTILIT (Wheldall & Beaman, 2000) and the Corrective Reading program (Adams & Engelmann, 1996; Gunn, Biglan, Smolkowski, & Ary, 2000) have demonstrated their effectiveness in this domain but have not yet achieved the mainstream recognition they deserve. It is in reaching the stage of automaticity that the apparent magic of skilled reading becomes evident – whole words are recognised as quickly as are individual letters. The actual process of reading, of transforming squiggles into language, appears transparent – that is, the words seem to leap off the page and into consciousness without any noticeable effort or strategy (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974).

The issue of variation in the effort required to make sense of print has been addressed by employing neuro-imaging techniques when both capable and struggling students are engaged in reading. Richards et al. (1999) noted that the poor readers used four to five times as much physical energy as the capable readers to complete the same phonological tasks in the left anterior lobe of the brain. This difference was not observed when non-language tasks were presented. It is unsurprising that motivation to read is a serious obstacle to overcome with struggling readers.

For skilled readers, there is no further need to resort to the slow, unreliable process of prediction based upon context, followed by confirmation. Though it may remain of value in understanding the meaning of a new word, attendance to such contextual cues is not required by competent readers as a strategy for obtaining the pronunciation of words. Isn’t skilled performance a wondrous thing? Wouldn’t it be marvellous if our brains were already wired for reading, so that teachers could simply evoke from students an existing but unexpressed reading talent (as was speech so evoked)? But, really, is there any area of skilled performance at a man-made task that does not require real dedication and serious practice from learners?

The moral is that there is no fast and dirty way of avoiding the sounding-out sequence. Any such avoidance will divert students into a reading cul-de-sac, leaving them doomed to rely upon their memory for overall shape rather than for letter position, to look for pictures, or to second-guess the authors, and to be forever battling with novel and technical words throughout their life.

Morphemic sources of information are also useful in coping with the challenges caused by the different (and sometimes contradictory) spelling conventions of English’ parent languages. Given that more than half the words in written English are derived from Greek or Latin (Henry, 1997), then much benefit in reading fluency, comprehension, and spelling can be gained from a systematic study of prefixes, suffixes and root words. This benefit is even more evident in the decoding and comprehension of technical words. Stages and Older Struggling Readers Intervention for older students requires far more intensity and duration than that for younger students (Swanson, 2001; Torgesen, 1998).

Intervention programs for older students have thus far provided little cause for optimism, particularly those that involve “eclectic approaches to teaching reading that were provided in an inconsistent fashion and for relatively brief periods” (Shaywitz et al. 1999, p.1336).

In fact, Alexander, Entwisle, and Olsen (1997) claim that reading improvement typically occurs twice as fast in first grade as it does in third grade, whilst Hall and Moats (1999) report the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development finding that it takes four times as much assistance to improve a child’s reading skills if help is delayed until Year 4 than if it is begun in the Prep year.

Apart from the efficiency gains for a system enabled by early identification and intervention, there are also pressing issues of social justice to be considered. Nevertheless, progress is achievable for older students when systematic research-validated approaches are well implemented (Wheldall & Beaman, 2000). For older struggling readers, the focus of intervention remains the same, as the majority of reading difficulties displayed by older students are fundamentally phonological (Al-Otaiba & Fuchs, in press, cited in Scruggs & Mastropieri, 2002; Ehri, 1995; Lovett & Steinbach, 1997; Shaywitz et al., 1999).

Thus, instruction should continue to emphasize letter-sound correspondences, blending, segmenting, and adequate practice (Bruck, 1998; Shankweiler, Lundquist, Dreyer, & Dickinson, 1996). As for younger students, it is only through such laborious letter-by-letter decoding can precise letter-order become entrenched in the orthographic representation that forms the basis for accurate spelling and fluent reading (Adams, 1990; Jorm & Share, 1983; Williams, 1991).

Of course, older students may also require attention to vocabulary enhancement, metacognitive strategies, and, possibly, motivational supports - the Matthew Effects having added to the student’s burden. For example, it can be difficult persuading students to discard their existing focus on context-and-initial-letters in favour of careful attention to all the letters and their positions in words. It usually involves a temporary slowing of the students’ reading rate - a price that some students are loath to pay (Apel & Swank, 1999).

Subtle persuasion may be initially necessary, and the intensive daily practice over a period of a year or more (Swanson, 2001; Wong, 2001) is eventually considered worthwhile by the students, when they begin to appreciate that reading actually can be enjoyable and meaningful. At this point, decoding skills and comprehension exert influences that assist each other (Berninger, 2001).

Comprehension Strategies

This is not the end of the story however – comprehension strategies assume greater significance as the texts students are required to read become increasingly demanding. Without the capacity for rapid context-free decoding, significant reading comprehension advances are unlikely to occur. When the orthographic stage has been achieved, students are at least able to employ in the reading task those oral language comprehension skills they have developed thus far (Crowley, Shrager, & Siegler, 1997).

In the earlier stages, their oral comprehension far exceeded their reading comprehension because of the decoding constraints. Their comprehension skills will have continued to develop if teachers have incorporated plenty of oral language activities into their program. Of course, as the volume and complexity of reading increases so, one expects, does the sophistication of their reading comprehension strategies. This process is not guaranteed, however. For some students with earlier decoding problems, reduced exposure to text has hampered overall reading progress, leaving lingering hurdles, such as vocabulary gaps or even chasms (Nagy, 1998).

Whereas good readers continuously increase their vocabulary and understanding of the world through their reading (Nagy & Anderson, 1984; Osborn & Armbruster, 2001), struggling students may read as little as one hundredth of that devoured by good readers thus compromising their vocabulary development and hence comprehension (Lyon, 2001).

Such vocabulary development is vitally dependent on the amount of reading, as conversation and television have much less impact on vocabulary growth than does reading (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998). Knowledge about the teaching of comprehension is less well advanced than it is for the lower-order decoding processes. It is known that passive reading is not consistent with adequate comprehension, and that when teachers model their own active comprehension processes for their students, and provide encouragement, guidance and regular practice opportunities - then students make superior progress than when teachers assume that such processes will develop naturally. Unfortunately, much of what passes for comprehension activities in schools involves testing students for their capacity to comprehend, rather than actually providing instruction. Activities that involve reading a text and subsequently answering questions are typical of this approach.

One reason for the lack of direct teaching is that (as with decoding) few teachers receive training in research-based methods of comprehension instruction (Snow, 2002). Some of the techniques that show promise in enhancing comprehension include learning how to monitor and query one’s own comprehension, to organise the text information in a meaningful manner, or employ visualisation techniques (Mastropieri, Leinart, & Scruggs, 1999).

A task once common in schools was instruction in how to produce a précis – a summary of what has just been read. Directly teaching the strategies involved in précis production, along with the active processing of information required by the task have also been shown to improve comprehension. Active comprehension strategies. Good readers are extremely active as they read, as is apparent whenever excellent adult readers are asked to think aloud as they go through text (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995).

Good readers are aware of why they are reading a text, gain an overview of the text before reading, make predictions about the upcoming text, read selectively based on their overview, associate ideas in text to what they already know, note whether their predictions and expectations about text content are being met, revise their prior knowledge when compelling new ideas conflicting with prior knowledge are encountered, figure out the meanings of unfamiliar vocabulary based on context clues, underline and reread and make notes and paraphrase to remember important points, interpret the text, evaluate its quality, review important points as they conclude reading, and think about how ideas encountered in the text might be used in the future.

Young and less skilled readers, in contrast, exhibit a lack of such activity (e.g., Cordón & Day, 1996) (Pressley, 2000, p.548). So, assisting readers to enhance their capacity to comprehend that which they read is a worthwhile activity. However, Mastropieri, Leinart, and Scruggs (1999), researchers with a long history in devising and evaluating metacognitive strategies, offer this timely caveat to those tempted to focus exclusively on comprehension strategies.

“However, reading programs that do not attempt directly to enhance the reading fluency of dysfluent readers cannot be considered complete - no amount of comprehension training can compensate for a slow, laboured rate of reading” (p.278C).

Conclusion

What then might be the value of considering stages? Teachers indicate a strong desire to assist students whose progress is a problem, but they report feel under-prepared. They are in need of workable approaches that can make a difference for students with diverse instructional needs (Schumm & Vaughn, 1995). The framework provided by the stage model enables teachers to make decisions about the type and level of assistance required by each of their students. Given the number of students who struggle with mastering reading, efficiency in the provision of initial teaching and subsequent support becomes very important for education systems (Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, & Seidenberg, 2001).

There are several components of effective whole-system or whole school approaches. Adequate time must be assigned to the task of providing initial reading instruction. Yet, it is increasingly recognized that not all students require the same level of direct teacher input.

A reduction in the number of students requiring significant 1:1 teacher time allows additional time to be provided for the seriously struggling students. This circumstance can eventuate when initial instruction reflects effective, research supported approaches, thereby producing fewer casualties and enabling the school costs of providing intensive support to be maintained at realistic levels.

Apart from the time variable, the other components of effective whole-system or whole-school approaches involve instructional content and delivery. Providing the appropriate content at different grade levels can be ensured through a consideration of stages and through employing empirically tested strategies for enhancing student development through those stages. Basing decisions on reading stages avoids the that eventuate for many students when the flawed cul de sacs three-cueing system and miscue analysis together form the basis for assessment and instruction (Hempenstall, 1998).

These frameworks, though popular, are based upon unsupported assertions about reading development and contribute to the literacy problems experienced by many students. A focus upon stages can also have social justice implications in that it enhances the likelihood that each of the students in our charge will receive the assistance appropriate to that student’s needs.

The analysis also reduces the likelihood of overlooking students in difficulty or of wasting students’ time on those tasks at which they are already adept.”

So, this is the conclusion of the topic.

What then might be the value of considering stages?

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A long piece!