PHONICS THEORIST

Phonics Theorist

Stages of Reading Development

Introduction

Knowledge of how to read does not just materialize, instead “reading” is taught by organized systematic directives. Reading is a skill which needs to be occasionally polished and it is an ongoing process. Students will flounder in their ability to learn if any stage of reading developed is ignored, affecting their writing skills in the process. It is very important for teachers to make certain that students completely understand every stage of the process of reading and writing before moving ahead to the next level. Jeanne Chall, famously known as reading expert and psychologist, a leading researcher, writer and teacher presented five Stages of Reading Development in which she declared that unlike adults, children start by “reading” and then “they read to learn” (Chall, 2008).

Discussion

Stage 1: Reading Readiness/Pre-Reading (Birth-6)

According to renowned professor Dr. Jeanne Chall, children follow predictable stages of reading development. At the earliest stage, children first gain control of language. They begin to realize that words are made up of a series of sounds and start to recognize rhyme and alliteration. If exposed to print, preschoolers also learn to recognize the alphabet and begin to learn the sounds associated with letters. They may begin to recognize a few words, relying largely on contextual information provided by pictures and highly predictable language.

Stage 2: Initial Reading or Decoding Stage (Ages 6-7)

At this stage, beginning readers learn to decode by sounding out words. They understand that letters and letter combinations represent sounds and use this knowledge to blend together simple words such as cat or top. This is the phase that generally is the first major barrier for a child with dyslexia (McDevitt & Ormrod, 2002). While your child will probably be able to understand that individual letters represent discrete sounds, he may find it extremely difficult to put the sounds together to spell words, and almost impossible to decode words by breaking down the component sounds.

Stage 3: Confirmation, Fluency, Ungluing from Print (Ages 7-8)

Once primary-level students have become adept at decoding, they begin to develop fluency and additional strategies to gain meaning from print. They are ready to read without sounding everything out. They begin to recognize whole words by their visual appearance and letter sequence (orthographic knowledge). They recognize familiar patterns and reach automatically in word recognition and gain fluency as they practice with reading familiar texts. The second stage of primary school is covered by Chall in Stage 3, which extends from the third to sixth grade and a little beyond. In this stage the reader reads to gain information. He reads mostly books that inform the field of humanities, natural sciences and in any other field of interest. He no longer reads to learn to read but to gain information about the world and the book begins to be one of its main sources of information (Carnine & Silbert, 2003). He no longer reads in a text to find what he already knows of another source, it reads to complete what ...