Process of Learning To Read

Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/6023.html
THE PROCESS OF LEARNING TO READ 41
The Process of Learning to Read
In this chapter, we review research on the process of reading and

what happens as children become readers. First, we outline how
children develop language and literacy skills before they begin for-
mal reading instruction. We then describe skilled reading as it is
engaged in by adults and continue by describing how children de-
velop to become readers.
READING AND LITERACY

In focusing in this report on preventing reading difficulties among
young children in the United States, we take a limited view of read-
ing, putting aside many issues and concerns that would belong to a
full consideration of literacy in various societies inside and outside
the United States. Acts of literacy vary a great deal—for example,
reading a listing in a phone book, reading a Shakespearean play, and
reading a dissertation on electromagnetic force. As different as these
are, there are commonalties among them. For most texts in most
situations, understanding what the text means is, if not the end goal
of the reader, at least an important intermediate step. If someone
has difficulty understanding, the problem could be a matter of lim-
41
Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

42 PREVENTING READING DIFFICULTIES IN YOUNG CHILDREN
ited knowledge; in the case of the physics dissertation, for example,

limited knowledge of physics could be the downfall, rather than a
reading difficulty per se. Having learned to read without difficulty
may not suffice to be literate with respect to that dissertation.
In our sense, literacy is both broader and more specific than
reading. Literate behaviors include writing and other creative or
analytical acts and at the same time invoke very particular bits of
knowledge and skill in specific subject matter domains (e.g., history,
physics, mathematics, etc.) (Anderson and Pearson, 1984). The read-
ing difficulties that we are considering are those that impede what
virtually all literacy activities have in common—the use of the prod-
ucts and principles of the writing system to get at the meaning of a
written text.
We recognize that reading-related development can start in in-
fancy or with toddlers. Many very young children are surrounded
by written language products and are exposed to the importance and
functions of reading in society. A child’s reading-related develop-
ment is interwoven and continuous with development that will lead
to expertise in other spheres of life.
There is, however, a point in a child’s growth when we expect
what many, including young children, often refer to as “real read-
ing” to start. Children are expected, without help, to read some
unfamiliar texts, relying on the print and drawing meaning from it.
What starts at this point is referred to in a variety of ways in the
literature: independent reading (Holdaway, 1979), the alphabetic
principle (Ferreiro and Teberosky, 1982), the alphabetic stage (Frith,
1985), the cipher stage (Gough and Hillinger, 1980), fully or truly
productive reading (Perfetti, 1985), and conventional reading
(Sulzby, 1994). We use the term conventional reading to encompass
the common meanings of these different terms.
Moving toward being a good reader means that a child has
gained a functional knowledge of the principles of the culture’s writ-
ing system—the English alphabetic writing system for children in the
United States—and details of its orthography. But the foundations
start earlier. Prior to real reading, young children gain functional
knowledge of the parts, products, and uses of the writing system and

the ways in which reading and oral language activities complement

each other and diverge from each other.
DEVELOPMENT BEFORE KINDERGARTEN:

THE FIRST FIVE YEARS
Learning to read and write begins long before the school years,
as the biological, cognitive, and social precursors are put into place.
One of the most important preconditions for literacy is the integrity
of a child’s health and sensory organs, since the window for the
establishment of such skills as language is relatively brief. The child’s
intelligence, as long as it is in the normal range, does not have much
of an impact on the ease of learning to read (Stanovich et al., 1984).
The capacity to learn to read and write is related to children’s age-
related developmental timetables, although there is no clear agree-
ment on the precise chronological or mental age nor on a particular
developmental level that children must reach before they are “ready”
to learn to read and write.
Children gain an increasingly complex and decontextualized un-
derstanding of the world as their brains develop during their first
years of life. As they grow and gain experience, new neural connec-
tions are established at irregular rates, with spurts and plateaus
(Peterson, 1994). Although this process is orderly, it is variable
among individual children due to differences in both biological and
experiential influences.
Children who become successful readers tend to exhibit age-
appropriate sensory, perceptual, cognitive, and social skills as they
progress through the preschool years. Through the interaction of
maturation and experience, they become increasingly adept at mas-
tering physical dexterity and locomotion, at categorizing and con-
structing relationships between physical objects, at remembering
facts and events over time, at engaging in imaginative play, at form-
ing social relationships, and so forth.
Of course, many factors in an infant’s life can affect develop-
ment, ranging from maternal mental and physical health to condi-
tions of housing, temperament, nutrition, and emotional stress and
support. Although all these can have an impact on later literacy

development via their impact on general development, we focus in

this chapter on factors that differentially affect reading. Counting,
number concepts, letter names and shapes, phonological awareness,
interest in literacy, and cooperation with peers are some of the pre-
school accomplishments that are of particular relevance to later aca-
demic challenges.
For instance, children grasp the notion that one object or event
may stand for another quite young (Marzolf and DeLoache, 1994).
Learning that the alphabet is a symbol system for sounds fits into
this stream of development. The ability to use symbols is gradually
acquired during the first years of life as children interpret and create
first iconic and then graphic representations. At age 3, most children
in the United States recognize that golden arches “stand for”
MacDonald’s. But the fact that most 3-year-olds are able to use
symbols in one context or domain does not mean that they can apply
this ability across all contexts and domains without specific practice.
Young children also begin to learn how symbols work, for instance,
using both hash marks and numerals to represent numerical infor-
mation, noting the differences between numerals and letters, com-
paring the way letters work in their own and their friends’ written
names, and understanding that letters symbolize sound segments
within words.
Children’s concepts about literacy are formed from the earliest
years by observing and interacting with readers and writers as well
as through their own attempts to read and write (Sulzby and Teale,
1991). In each situation they encounter, their understanding is both
increased and constrained by their existing models of written lan-
guage. In other words, while these existing models mediate and
enable understanding, the knowledge and beliefs of which these
models are composed are modified with use as the child explores
language, text, and meaning. Beyond incremental learning, certain
changes in perspective and reorganizations of concept are also neces-
sary. In this way, the breadth, depth, and nature of children’s en-
gagement with text determines a great deal of literacy learning.
The interplay between elaboration and reorganization of
children’s mental models has been well documented in the domain of
orthographic development (Ehri, 1991; Gough and Juel, 1991). Vi-

sual word recognition can flourish only when children displace the
belief that print is like pictures with the insight that written words
are comprised of letters that, in turn, map to speech sounds. Even as
children begin to learn about spellings, they must also develop more
sophisticated understandings of the forces beyond pictures and indi-
vidual words that direct text meaning. These include, for example,
the nature of word, sentence, paragraph, and text structures and the
sorts of thinking and devices that hold them all together. Whereas
each such type of learning depends on experience and exploration, it
must also depend on certain conceptual insights.
For the child, Downing (1979:27) suggests, language is not an
object of awareness in itself but is “seemingly like a glass, through
which the child looks at the surrounding world, . . . not [initially]
suspecting that it has its own existence, its own aspects of construc-
tion.” To become a mature reader and writer, charged with con-
structing and corroborating the message of an author, this percep-
tion must change. Moreover, each such change must be guided by
the metalinguistic insight that language invites inspection and reflec-
tion. Indeed, literacy growth, at every level, depends on learning to
treat language as an object of thought, in and of itself (Halliday,
1982; Olson, 1995). See Box 2-1 for definitions of metacognition
and metalinguistic.
For most children, growing up to be a reader is a lengthy process
that begins long before formal instruction is provided in school or
elsewhere. The following sections offer a brief sketch of what is
BOX 2-1
More Definitions
“Metacognition” refers to thoughts about thinking (cognition); for exam-

ple, thinking about how to understand a passage.
“Metalinguistic” refers to language or thought about language; for exam-
ple, noting that the word “snake” refers to a long skinny thing all in one
piece but that the word itself is neither long nor skinny and has four parts
when spoken and five parts when written.

learned, when it is learned, and in what kinds of situations learning

takes place during the course of successful language and literacy
development in early childhood.
Language Development
Children with intact neurological systems, raised by caring adults

in a speech community, fairly effortlessly acquire the spoken lan-
guage of that community, exhibiting abilities within the domains of
phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and lexicon
or vocabulary (see Box 2-2).
Knowing a language, however, does not require a conscious
awareness of the various systems involved in that language, nor does
it necessitate an ability to articulate the underlying principles or
components of the systems. Metalinguistic insights about some lan-
guage domains typically emerge in the preschool years, however, as
discussed later in this section.
Practically from birth, infants are able to distinguish all the
sounds of any human language, and within a short time their percep-
tual abilities become tuned to their native language, even though
their productive repertoire remains limited to nonspeech sounds and
babbling for much of the first year of life (e.g., Werker and Lalonde,
1988). Phonological development continues well beyond the first
BOX 2-2
Key Definitions of the Components of Language
“Phonology” refers to the way sounds of the language operate.

“Morphology” refers to the way words are formed and are related to each
other.
“Semantics” refers to the ways that language conveys meaning.
“Pragmatics” refers to the ways the members of the speech community
achieve their goals using language.
“Lexicon” or vocabulary refers to stored information about the meanings
and pronunciation of words.

year and probably continues to be refined even in the early school

years (e.g., Nittrouer, 1992; Gerken et al., 1994; Fowler, 1991).
It has been argued that children’s perception of speech undergoes
a shift from holistic (based on overall prosodic or acoustic shapes of
syllables and words) to truly segmental (based on small phonemic
units) during the late preschool period (Jusczyk et al., 1993; Studdert-
Kennedy, 1986; and other studies reviewed in Gerken et al., 1994).
This issue could be important for alphabetic reading, in which the
letters correspond roughly to phonemes, especially if, as has been
suggested by some speech researchers (Walley, 1993), it is not until
the early school years that a child’s lexicon becomes large enough to
force the shift from holistic to segment-based strategies. It also
points to one possible basis for the well-documented link between
vocabulary size and early reading ability: the development of fine
within-word discrimination ability (phonemic representation) may
be contingent on vocabulary size rather than age or general develop-
mental level. The potential immaturity of some children’s phono-
logical encoding/representation systems at the time formal reading
instruction begins may impede their achieving a level of phonemic
awareness for spoken words related to fluent decoding of written
words.
Comprehension of words emerges somewhat before the ability
to produce words, at around the time of a child’s first birthday
(Huttenlocher and Smiley, 1987; Nelson, 1973), and many children
exhibit a sharp increase in the size of their working vocabularies
during the second year of life (Bates et al., 1988). Vocabulary growth
is rapid throughout the preschool and school years, and it is highly
variable among individual children. Although there have been many
attempts to estimate the size of children’s vocabularies, problems
arise because of definitions (e.g., what it means to know a word) and
differences in the procedures used to estimate vocabulary size (Beck
and McKeown, 1991; Nagy and Anderson, 1984). Despite this
imprecision, individual differences have been shown to be reliably
related to demographics; for example, one study found that first
graders from higher-income backgrounds had about double the vo-
cabulary size of those from lower-income ones (Graves and Slater,
1987).

Vocabulary size continues to increase with schooling and be-

yond. It is estimated that students acquire around seven words per
day (2,700-3,000 words per year) during the elementary through
high school years (Just and Carpenter, 1987; Nagy and Herman,
1987; Smith, 1941). A review of this research points out that it may
be more correct to say that children become aware of seven words
per day but that a longer learning process is necessary for these
words to affect the child’s comprehension and use of language (Beck
and McKeown, 1991).
Another perspective on vocabulary growth stresses that new
words are not simply added in a serial fashion to a static and estab-
lished vocabulary. Rather, the exposure to new words alters and
refines the semantic representations of words already in the child’s
vocabulary and the relationships among them (Landauer and
Dumais, 1997). Word counts, then, may be a very imprecise mea-
sure of vocabulary development.
Research on grammatical development in young children sug-
gests a very rapid acquisition of the basic syntactic structures of the
native language (e.g., Brown, 1973; Pinker, 1984; other studies re-
viewed in Bloom et al., 1994). For example, children under two
years of age show the kind of knowledge of word order in English
that allows them to appreciate that “Big Bird is tickling Cookie
Monster” means something different from “Cookie Monster is tick-
ling Big Bird” (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987; see Golinkoff and Hirsch-
Pasek, 1995, for a review). Some time after they are able to compre-
hend simple sentences, children begin to combine words so as to
express some structural and/or syntactic relationship between them.
The child’s sentences grow in length and complexity from two to
three to four or more words, on average, over the remainder of the
preschool period. By the time of school entry, most children pro-
duce and comprehend a wide range of grammatical forms, although
some structures are still developing.
Children’s increasing linguistic sophistication allows them to use
language as a means of engaging in more complex information ex-
changes with adults and older children. During book sharing with
an adult, for instance, children progress from just focusing on the
names of objects in the pictures to asking questions about the con-

tent of the text. The child’s ability to produce and comprehend

complex sentences (with appropriate vocabulary and accurate pro-
nunciation) then enables him or her to discuss abstract ideas (“What
if . . . ?”), absent objects, and past events. This decreased reliance on
immediate context as a support for communication is a developmen-
tal accomplishment that may ease the transition to school, where
decontextualized language is highly valued.
Throughout the preschool period and well into adulthood, indi-
viduals learn the pragmatics of their language, that is, how to use
language appropriately and effectively in social contexts (see Ninio
and Snow, 1996, for a review). During the preschool years, the
development of these abilities occurs in three domains: (1) produc-
tion of conventional speech acts, such as requesting, attention get-
ting, and describing (Dore, 1974, 1975, 1976; Snow et al., 1996); (2)
use of conversational skills, including turn taking, topic contingency,
and topic development (Bloom et al., 1976; Dorval and Eckerman,
1984; Schley and Snow, 1992; Snow, 1977); and (3) production of
extended autonomous discourse such as narratives, explanations,
definitions, and other socially defined genres (Donaldson, 1986;
Peterson and McCabe, 1983; Snow, 1990).
Much of the work in the field of pragmatics describes how chil-
dren learn the rules for using language in specific situations, such as
book reading (Ninio and Bruner, 1978; Snow and Ninio, 1986;
Snow and Goldfield, 1983), sharing time (Michaels, 1991), and din-
ner table talk (Beals, 1993; Blum-Kulka, 1993). One avenue for
introducing and refining new pragmatic functions is through experi-
ence with books and other literacy activities. For instance, in time,
children begin to appreciate stories in which characters use language
to deceive or pretend, to understand the point of fables and other
texts that include metaphors and other figurative devices, and to
grasp the differences between narrative, expository, poetic, and other
varieties of texts that books can contain.
As proficiency in the forms and functions of language grows,
children also gain “metalinguistic” skills. These involve the ability
not just to use language but to think about it, play with it, talk about
it, analyze it componentially, and make judgments about acceptable
versus incorrect forms (e.g., Pratt et al., 1984). Metalinguistic in-

sights are applied in all language domains (phonology, syntax, se-

mantics, pragmatics), such that pronunciation, word usage, and sen-
tence and text forms can all be thought about in this new way by the
child. It was originally thought that this aspect of language develop-
ment did not begin to emerge until about school age, but more recent
research has demonstrated that some children exhibit rudimentary
metalinguistic skills by age 3 or even younger and that many chil-
dren acquire a considerable degree of metalinguistic insight about
sentences, words, and speech sounds by age 4 to 5 years, before they
enter school. It is also clear that metalinguistic skills continue to
improve throughout the school years.
One interesting metalinguistic development is the child’s grow-
ing appreciation of what a word is. Although even very young
children understand the idea that things have “names,” the more
abstract concept of words as the building blocks of phrases and
sentences, and as linguistic units whose sounds are arbitrarily related
to their meanings, is only gradually attained during the preschool
years (e.g., Tunmer et al., 1984; Chaney, 1989; Papandropoulou
and Sinclair, 1974). These studies revealed that young children
initially are unable to make a distinction between the word itself and
the object or action it refers to and cannot break sentences into their
component words. When asked to judge the length of words, for
instance, “snake” is typically deemed to be a “long” word, and
“caterpillar” a “short” one, until the child begins to understand
words as distinct from their referents. Likewise, when asked to
segment sentences (e.g., on the pretext of saying it slowly enough for
the examiner to write it down), young children rarely isolate single
words but instead break the sentence into phrases (e.g., The little girl
/ was eating / an ice cream cone.) Gradually, nouns, then verbs and
modifiers, and finally function words (such as articles, conjunctions,
and prepositions) come to be understood as individual linguistic
units, even though the boundaries between them may sometimes be
mistaken (e.g., “a / nambulance” rather than “an / ambulance”).
Another aspect of metalinguistic development is the child’s abil-
ity to attend to and analyze the internal phonological structure of
spoken words.

Phonological Awareness
This sketch of language development and of initial metalinguistic

accomplishments applies quite universally to all children learning to
read. For children learning an alphabetic language, like English,
there is an important additional ingredient: phonological awareness
and, in particular, phonemic awareness. As discussed in Chapter 1,
in English, the printed symbols (letters or graphemes) systematically
represent the component sounds of the language. Understanding the
basic alphabetic principle requires an awareness that spoken lan-
guage can be analyzed into strings of separable words and words, in
turn, into sequences of syllables and phonemes within syllables (see
Box 2-3).
The assessment of phonemic awareness typically involves tasks
that require the student to isolate or segment one or more of the
phonemes of a spoken word, to blend or combine a sequence of
separate phonemes into a word, or to manipulate the phonemes
within a word (e.g., adding, subtracting, or rearranging phonemes of
one word to make a different word).
Spoken words can be phonologically subdivided at several differ-
ent levels of analysis. These include the syllable (in the word protect,
/pro/ and /tEkt/); the onset and rime within the syllable (/pr/ and
/o/, and /t/ and /Ekt/, respectively); and the individual phonemes
themselves (/p/, /r/, /o/, /t/, /E/, /k/, and /t/). The term phonological
awareness refers to a general appreciation of the sounds of speech as
distinct from their meaning. When that insight includes an under-
standing that words can be divided into a sequence of phonemes,
this finer-grained sensitivity is termed phonemic awareness.
For most children, an awareness of the phonological structure of
speech generally develops gradually over the preschool years. Among
the first signs of awareness that spoken words contain smaller com-
ponents are monitoring and correcting speech errors and “playing”
with sounds (e.g., “pancakes, cancakes, canpakes”), both of which
even 2- to 3-year-olds have been observed to do occasionally in
naturalistic conversational settings. Appreciating rhymes (for in-
stance, that light rhymes with kite) has also been noted in young
preschoolers. The entry to phonemic awareness typically begins with

BOX 2-3
Key Definitions of Some Terms
That Are Often Confused
The terms phonology and phonological refer to the sound structure of

speech and, in particular, to the perception, representation, and produc-
tion of speech sounds. As such, the phonological aspects of language
include its prosodic dimensions—intonation, stress, and timing—as well
as its articulatory units, including words, syllables, and phonemes.
Phonemes are the speech phonological units that make a difference to

meaning. Thus, the spoken word rope is comprised of three phonemes:
/r/, /o/, and /p/. It differs by only one phoneme from each of the spoken
words, soap, rode, and rip.
Phonemic awareness is the insight that every spoken word can be con-
ceived as a sequence of phonemes. Because phonemes are the units of
sound that are represented by the letters of an alphabet, an awareness of
phonemes is key to understanding the logic of the alphabetic principle
and thus to the learnability of phonics and spelling.
Phonological awareness is a more inclusive term than phonemic aware-

ness and refers to the general ability to attend to the sounds of language
as distinct from its meaning. Phonemic awareness generally develops
through other, less subtle levels of phonological awareness. Noticing
similarities between words in their sounds, enjoying rhymes, counting
syllables, and so forth are indications of such “metaphonological” skill.
Speech discrimination, including phonemic discrimination, is distin-

guished from phonemic awareness because the ability to detect or dis-
criminate even slight differences between two spoken words does not
necessarily indicate an awareness of the nature of that difference. More-
over, the study of the phonetics indicates that, both within and between
speakers, there are many variations in the acoustic and articulatory prop-
erties of speech, including phonemes, that are not functionally significant
to meaning.
The term phonics refers to instructional practices that emphasize how

spellings are related to speech sounds in systematic ways.
The term phonological decoding or, more simply, decoding, refers to the
aspect of the reading process that involves deriving a pronunciation for a
printed sequence of letters based on knowledge of spelling-sound corre-
spondences.

an appreciation of alliteration, for instance, that boy and butterfly

begin with /b/. Even so, many children initially find it difficult to
separate the component phonemes of a complex onset, reporting for
example that the first sound of play is /pl/ rather than /p/ or failing to
represent both sounds of such initial blends in their independent
spelling. Many books geared toward this age group appropriately
include rhyming and alliterative texts, and this may be one avenue
by which children’s attention is drawn to the sounds of speech
(Bryant et al., 1990). In a sample of 3- and 4-year-olds, Chaney
(1992) found that 91 percent of the children could judge correctly
whether a “Martian” puppet said English words correctly, 37 per-
cent could be induced by the examiner to engage in sound play, and
26 percent could reliably identify rhyming words. Identifying words
that began with a particular phoneme, however, was accomplished
only by 14 percent of the children, and we know from other studies
that not until age 5 or 6 are such segmentation skills exhibited by a
majority of children (e.g., Calfee et al., 1973; Liberman et al., 1974).
Hence, phonological awareness is correlated with age (Chaney, 1992;
Hakes, 1980; Smith and Tager-Flusberg, 1982).
Chaney (1992) also observed that performance on phonological
awareness tasks by preschoolers was highly correlated with general
language ability. Moreover, it was measures of semantic and syntac-
tic skills, rather than speech discrimination and articulation, that
predicted phonological awareness differences. Correlations between
metalinguistic and more basic language abilities have similarly been
reported by others (e.g., Bryant et al., 1990; Bryant, 1974; Smith and
Tager-Flusberg, 1982). These findings indicate that the develop-
ment of phonological awareness (and other metalinguistic skills) is
closely intertwined with growth in basic language proficiency during
the preschool years.
True phonemic awareness extends beyond an appreciation of
rhyme or alliteration, as it corresponds to the insight that every word
can be conceived of as a sequence of phonemes. Children with
phonemic awareness are able to discern that camp and soap end with
the same sound, that blood and brown begin with the same sound,
or, more advanced still, that removing the /m/ from smell leaves sell.

Because of the physical and psychological nature of phonemes as

well as the nature of human attention, few children acquire phone-
mic awareness spontaneously (Adams et al., 1998). Rather, attain-
ing phonemic awareness is difficult for most children and far more
difficult for some than others. Still, because phonemes are the units
of sound that are represented by the letters of an alphabet, an aware-
ness of phonemes is key to understanding the logic of the alphabetic
principle. Unless and until children have a basic awareness of the
phonemic structure of language, asking them for the first sound in
the word boy, or expecting them to understand that cap has three
sounds while camp has four, is to little avail.
In terms of acoustics, the syllable is an indivisible entity. By
extension, unless and until children have come to conceive of syl-
lables in terms of the underlying sequence of elementary speech
sounds of which they are comprised, their only option for learning to
read or spell words is by rote memorization.
The theoretical and practical importance of phonological aware-
ness for the beginning reader relies not only on logic but also on the
results of several decades of empirical research. Early studies showed
a strong association between a child’s ability to read and the ability
to segment words into phonemes (Liberman et al., 1974). Dozens of
subsequent studies have confirmed that there is a close relationship
between phonemic awareness and reading ability, not just in the
early grades (e.g., Ehri and Wilce, 1980, 1985; Perfetti et al., 1987)
but throughout the school years (Calfee et al., 1973; Shankweiler et
al., 1995). Furthermore, as we discuss in Chapter 4, even prior to
formal reading instruction, the performance of kindergartners on
tests of phonological awareness is a strong predictor of their future
reading achievement (Juel, 1991; Scarborough, 1989; Stanovich,
1986; Wagner et al., 1994).
Phonological and phonemic awareness should not be confused
with speech perception, per se. Speech perception is the natural
ability to detect and discriminate the sounds of one’s language, for
instance, to be able to tell the difference between spoken stimuli that
have many elements in common, such as mail and nail, back and
bag. (The term auditory discrimination is sometimes incorrectly
applied to this skill, but that broader label also encompasses the

ability to perceive other nonspeech sounds, such as tones, environ-

mental noises, music, and so forth.)
Because speech perception involves some of the same sensory
and neural circuits as are used for hearing generally, children with
hearing impairments generally also have poor speech discrimination.
Other children have intact hearing but are selectively impaired in
making discriminations among speech sounds. Not surprisingly,
children who, for whatever reason, possess poor speech discrimina-
tion skills are likely to have difficulty acquiring phonological aware-
ness. Nevertheless, many young children who perform satisfactorily
on tests of speech discrimination exhibit weak phonological aware-
ness.
Furthermore, whereas good phonological awareness in young
children is a strong predictor of reading success, good performance
on speech discrimination measures is not (see Chapter 4). In short,
when administering a test of phonological awareness, it is always
prudent to assess also the accuracy of the child’s perception of the
stimuli (e.g., by having the child repeat items aloud before perform-
ing the desired manipulation of the sounds). The research is clear,
however, in showing that phonological awareness is different from
and much more closely related to reading than speech perception
itself.
It is also important to clarify the difference between phonologi-
cal awareness and phonics. Phonics is the term that has long been
used among educators to refer to instruction in how the sounds of
speech are represented by letters and spellings, for instance, that the
letter M represents the phoneme /m/ and the various conventions by
which the long sounds of vowels are signaled. Phonics, in short,
presumes a working awareness of the phonemic composition of
words. In conventional phonics programs, however, such awareness
was generally taken for granted, and therein lies the force of the
research on phonemic awareness. To the extent that children lack
such phonemic awareness, they are unable to internalize usefully
their phonics lessons. The resulting symptoms include difficulties in
sounding and blending new words, in retaining words from one
encounter to the next, and in learning to spell. In contrast, research
repeatedly demonstrates that, when steps are taken to ensure an

adequate awareness of phonemes, the reading and spelling growth of

the group as a whole is accelerated and the incidence of reading
failure is diminished. These results have been obtained with normal
as well as various at-risk populations (see Chapter 5).
Despite some confusion in the media and in some educational
circles, phonemic awareness and phonological awareness are not
just new terms for speech discrimination or for traditional phonics
instruction. Instead, they are terms that emphasize the importance
of sensitive and informed early literacy support and assessment that
take account of the cognitive elusiveness of the insights and observa-
tions on which learning an alphabetic script depend. In addition,
they are terms that serve to remind us of the fact that, no less than
for higher-order dimensions of literacy growth, productive learning
about decoding and spelling necessarily builds on prior understand-
ing.
One of the most interesting findings from research on the devel-
opment of phonological awareness is that its relationship to learning
to read appears to be bidirectional, involving reciprocal causation
(Ehri and Wilce, 1980, 1986; Perfetti et al., 1987). In other words,
on one hand, some basic appreciation of the phonological structure
of spoken words appears to be necessary for the child to discover the
alphabetic principle that print represents the sounds of the language.
Moreover, as we discuss in later chapters of this report, numerous
studies have shown that learning to read can be facilitated by provid-
ing explicit instruction that directs children’s attention to the phono-
logical structure of words, indicating that phonological awareness
plays a causal role in learning to read (see Chapter 6). On the other
hand, instruction in alphabetic literacy, particularly regarding the
correspondences between letters and phonemes, in turn appears to
facilitate further growth in phonological (especially phonemic)
awareness. That is why adults from nonliterate societies and stu-
dents who learn to read nonalphabetic languages exhibit much
weaker levels of phonological awareness than do readers of alpha-
betic languages (Morais et al., 1986; Read et al., 1986).
Not surprisingly, therefore, the correlation between reading and
phonological awareness, which is already substantial by the start of
school, becomes stronger during the early grades. This strong corre-

lation appears to be strengthened by the association between phone-

mic awareness and children’s ability to sound out (or phonologically
decode) pronounceable nonwords and unfamiliar printed words.
Theorists such as Share (1995) have argued that becoming skilled in
phonological decoding provides the child with a self-teaching mecha-
nism that, along with oral vocabulary knowledge and context, is
useful for learning to read words that they have not previously en-
countered. After a few such correct decodings, these words can be
recognized quite automatically. In thinking about the process of
learning to read and about how best to frame early reading instruc-
tion, it is important to bear in mind these powerful reciprocal influ-
ences of reading skill and phonological awareness on each other.
Literacy Development
Children live in homes that support literacy development to dif-

fering degrees. Optimal development occurs through interactions
that are physically, emotionally, socially, and cognitively suited to
the changing needs of the infant through toddler years. Late in the
first year, when babies begin to purposively grasp and manipulate
various objects, books and writing implements enter their explor-
atory worlds. Parents negotiate with children about how books are
to be handled (Snow and Ninio, 1986; Bus and van IJzendoorn,
1995, 1997). Infants between about 8 and 12 months who are read
to by their parents typically show monthly progress from grabbing
and mouthing books, to “hinging” the covers, to turning the pages.
Much of this reading-like behavior is accompanied by babbling.
In years two and three, children advance from babbling to pro-
ducing understandable speech in response to books and to markings
that they themselves create. Late in the second year or early in the
third, many children produce reading-like as well as drawing-like
scribbles and recognizable letters or letter-like forms (see Box 2-4).
Two- and three-year-olds are often introduced by adults to models
of letters and related sounds, drawing attention to sources such as
Sesame Street on television. Many of these children are also in child
care settings where teachers and caregivers expose them to models of
reading and writing.

BOX 2-4
Goodnight Moon
“Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown,” proclaims a three-year

old girl, who pretends to read the cover page and author’s name. With
great relish, she opens the book and faithfully recites each word from
memory.
The mother knows that the girl is not really reading but encourages her
just the same. Intuitively, she suspects what has been found by research
to be true: that children who pretend to read at this early age are more
likely to become successful later.
“ . . . and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon,” continues the
girl. She lifts the book close to her eyes and scrutinizes the print on the
page.
“A-B-A-B-Z,” she recites. while pointing to the word cow. This is an
important connection. Already, she knows that words are made of letters
that can be named.
She resumes the story word for word, turning pages slowly. “Good-
night noises everywhere,” she whispers, and then pronounces, “The end,”
proudly snapping the book shut.
Parents assist in their children’s literacy development with sensi-

tivity to culturally specific social routines in book reading1 (Snow
and Goldfield, 1982; Snow and Ninio, 1986; Teale and Sulzby, 1986;
1987; Kaderavek and Sulzby, 1998a, 1998b; Sulzby and Kaderavek,
1996). Research conducted by Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines (1988)
and Gadsden (1994) reveals that literacy resources are available in
the homes of even very poor and stressed families, although different
in quantity and variety than in moderate- or higher-income families
(Baker et al., 1997). It is clear that during this period children
develop expectations that certain kinds of intonations and wording
are used with books and other written materials. Those who are
read to frequently and enjoy such reading begin to recite key phrases
or longer stretches of words specific to certain books.
1Routines with cultural significance as powerful as that of book reading do not appear to
be widespread in the area of writing, although this may be due to lack of relevant research
(Burns and Casbergue, 1992; Anderson and Stokes, 1984; Teale, 1986).

Late in this period, many children label and comment about

pictured items, describe pictured actions, and engage in some ques-
tion-and-answer dialogue and/or create voices for characters in pic-
tures (Kaderavek and Sulzby, 1998a, 1998b; Sulzby and Kaderavek,
1996; Sulzby and Teale, 1987; Whitehurst et al., 1988).
Between the ages of 3 and 4, children show rapid growth in
literacy (as in other domains), as they experiment with writing by
forming scribbles, random strings of letters, and letter-like forms.
Some children begin to identify salient sounds within words, and
some 4-year-olds are even able to demonstrate this knowledge in
their writing by beginning to use invented spelling, at least with
initial consonants (in English, many Spanish-speaking children tend
to use vowels first). These children may spend time with toys and
manipulatives that include letters, numerals, and playful representa-
tions of letter sounds and other symbol systems. More and more
such toys contain mechanisms that “say” letters or words in re-
sponse to a child’s action. Sesame Street on television and CD-
ROMs also provide meaningful stimuli at the letter, sound, word,
and text level, and children at this age often control the repeatability
of these stimuli using VCRs and computers.
Children who are frequently read to will then “read” their favor-
ite books by themselves by engaging in oral language-like and writ-
ten language-like routines (Sulzby and Teale, 1987, 1991). For most
children at this age, emergent reading routines include attending to
pictures and occasionally to salient print, such as that found in
illustrations or labels. A few begin to attend to the print in the main
body of the text, and a few make the transition into conventional
reading with their favorite books (Anbar, 1986; Backman, 1983;
Bissex, 1980; Jackson, 1991; Jackson et al., 1988; Lass, 1982, 1983;
Sulzby, 1985a).
During this time, children tend to create many and varied texts
and display different kinds of writing systems. Clay’s (1975) title,
“What did I write?”, came from a child query to a parent and
captures part of children’s writing development during this period.
Clay examined children’s early nonconventional writings and found
that, even with scribble and nonphonetic letter strings, children ap-
pear to be exploring features that they abstract about print, such as

its linearity and use of recursive features. Read (1971) and Chomsky
(1975) were among the first to examine the writing of children whose
untutored spellings reflected phonetic and phonological analysis of
speech. Read (1975) demonstrated that children at these ages have
already developed conceptual categories for consonant and vowel
sounds in spoken English and that these categories, which were lin-
guistically sound, appeared to underlie the invented spellings found
in the children’s writing.
Although it appears that children are hard at work as scholars of
language, observations of children engaging in literacy activities in
homes and preschools depict them as playful and exploratory in
most of these activities.
Table 2-1 shows a set of particular accomplishments that the
successful learner is likely to exhibit during the preschool years.
This list is neither exhaustive nor incontestable, but it does capture
many highlights of the course of literacy acquisition that have been
revealed through several decades of research. Needless to say, the
timing of these accomplishments will to some extent depend on
maturational and experiential differences between children.
CHARACTERISTICS OF SKILLED READING
Skilled readers can be compared with less skilled readers on their

comprehension (meanings of words, basic meaning of text, making
inferences from text) and on the accuracy and speed of their identifi-
cation of strings of letters as words (decoding familiar, unfamiliar,
and pseudo-words). The same set of cognitive skills distinguishes
skilled from unskilled readers at the adult level as at the middle
grade level (Bell and Perfetti, 1994; Bruck, 1990; Daneman and
Carpenter, 1980; Haenggi and Perfetti, 1992; Jackson and
McClelland, 1979; Palmer et al., 1985; Cunningham et al., 1990).
We present an overview of the capacities of the skilled reader in
comprehension and in word decoding.

TABLE 2-1 Developmental Accomplishments of Literacy

Acquisition
Birth to Three-Year-Old Accomplishments

• Recognizes specific books by cover.
• Pretends to read books.
• Understands that books are handled in particular ways.
• Enters into a book-sharing routine with primary caregivers.
• Vocalization play in crib gives way to enjoyment of rhyming language,
nonsense word play, etc.
• Labels objects in books.
• Comments on characters in books.
• Looks at picture in book and realizes it is a symbol for real object.
• Listens to stories.
• Requests/commands adult to read or write.
• May begin attending to specific print such as letters in names.
• Uses increasingly purposive scribbling.
• Occasionally seems to distinguish between drawing and writing.
• Produces some letter-like forms and scribbles with some features of
English writing.
Three- to Four-Year-Old Accomplishments

• Knows that alphabet letters are a special category of visual graphics
that can be individually named.
• Recognizes local environmental print.
• Knows that it is the print that is read in stories.
• Understands that different text forms are used for different functions
of print (e.g., list for groceries).
• Pays attention to separable and repeating sounds in language (e.g.,
Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater, Peter Eater).
• Uses new vocabulary and grammatical constructions in own speech.
• Understands and follows oral directions.
• Is sensitive to some sequences of events in stories.
• Shows an interest in books and reading.
• When being read a story, connects information and events to life
experiences.
• Questions and comments demonstrate understanding of literal meaning
of story being told.
• Displays reading and writing attempts, calling attention to self: “Look
at my story.”
• Can identify 10 alphabet letters, especially those from own name.
• “Writes” (scribbles) message as part of playful activity.
• May begin to attend to beginning or rhyming sound in salient words.

Comprehension
Skilled readers are good comprehenders. They differ from un-

skilled readers in their use of general world knowledge to compre-
hend text literally as well as to draw valid inferences from texts, in
their comprehension of words, and in their use of comprehension-
monitoring and repair strategies.
Comprehension research has demonstrated clearly the impor-
tance of the reader’s background knowledge for understanding texts
(Anderson and Pearson, 1984; Anderson et al., 1977; Bransford and
Johnson, 1972). Knowledge of the content addressed by a text plays
an important role in the reader’s formation of the text’s main ideas
(Afflerbach, 1990) and can be traded off to some extent against
weak word recognition skills (Adams et al., 1996; Recht and Leslie,
1988). When studies have assessed the role of both basic processes
and stores of relevant knowledge at a sufficiently fine grain, the two
seem to make separable contributions to comprehension (Haenggi
and Perfetti, 1994).
Recent research accommodates the role of world knowledge in a
comprehensive account of text comprehension that focuses on en-
coding the basic meaning of the text sentences (Kintsch, 1988;
Mannes and St. George, 1996). Both the basic comprehension of
literal text meanings and the use of knowledge necessary to go be-
yond the literal (propositional meaning) are accounted for. In com-
bining the importance of the linguistic forms of the text with the
importance of the reader’s background knowledge, the research
makes a distinction between the reader’s understanding of what the
text says, the text base, and what the text is about, the situation
model (van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983). In fact, text research has
increasingly focused on the fact that a reader may understand several
levels of text information, including information about text genre
and communication contexts, as well as the text itself and the refer-
ential situation (Graesser et al., 1997). To consider just one level for
illustration, understanding the situation described in storylike texts
typically requires understanding the narrative and the temporal-
causal structures, even when the causal relations between text ele-

ments are only implicit (Trabasso and van den Broek, 1985; van den
Broek, 1994). Because texts cannot be fully explicit, situation mod-
els require the use of knowledge and inferences (see Fletcher et al.,
1994, for a review).
An important part of comprehension is concept development
and knowledge of word meanings. Vocabulary knowledge has long
been known to be a major correlate of comprehension ability, as
measured by standardized tests (e.g., Davis, 1944, 1968). Research
has found that comprehension is diminished by lack of relevant
word knowledge (Anderson and Freebody, 1983; Kame’enui et al.,
1982; Marks et al., 1974). Mezynski (1983) and Stahl and Fairbanks
(1986) reviewed a series of studies that trained subjects for word/
concept development to improve comprehension scores and found
that, when certain conditions of instruction were met, the gain in
comprehension was attained.
Of course, some comprehension of passages is possible, even
when a few of the words are unknown to the reader (Anderson and
Freebody, 1983; Kame’enui et al., 1982). Reading itself can provide
one with meanings for unfamiliar words, although readers also fail
to learn much about most of the unfamiliar words they encounter
(Jenkins et al., 1984; Nagy et al., 1985; Shu et al., 1995; Stahl et al.,
1989).
Comprehension monitoring is the ability to accurately assess
one’s own comprehension (Baker and Anderson, 1982; Garner,
1980; Otero and Kintsch, 1992; Vosniadou et al., 1988). To study
this, an inconsistency is introduced into a short text, to see whether
the reader detects it either during recall or when explicitly ques-
tioned. A typical result is that some readers do and some do not
detect these inconsistencies, and those who do tend to be either older
readers (compared with younger readers) or more skilled (compared
with less skilled) readers. A less skilled reader may fail to detect the
contradictions in texts because they have misconceptions about high-
level reading goals (Myers and Paris, 1978). An alternate explana-
tion is that less skilled readers have difficulties with the component
processes of representing a text (i.e., word identification and basic
comprehension) and that this difficulty rather than an independent
failure to employ a monitoring strategy is the source of the problem.

There is some evidence supporting the latter explanation (Kintsch,

1992; Vosniadou et al., 1988). Whatever the explanation, however,
training in metacognitive skills has been shown to be effective for
improving comprehension (Brown et al., 1984; Paris et al., 1984;
Gambrell and Bales, 1986; Palincsar and Brown, 1984).
Many basic cognitive processes are shared during reading and
listening. Syntactic and inferential processes as well as background
and word knowledge play a role in both. The correlations between
listening comprehension and reading comprehension are high for
adult populations (Gernsbacher et al., 1990; Sticht and James, 1984)
and for older children (Carlisle, 1989). A large number of studies
have compared listening to a text and reading one at different grade
levels (Sticht et al., 1974; Sticht and James, 1984). The correlation
between reading and listening across these studies rose from grades 1
through 6 and tended not to show further increases. Sticht et al.
(1974) further noted that studies tended to find reading comprehen-
sion to exceed listening comprehension for college-age students but
not younger students. Using their analysis as an approximation,
“mature” reading comprehension might be said to begin when the
advantage of listening over written comprehension disappears, in
seventh or eighth grade.
Three observations are important in interpreting data on the
relationship between listening and reading comprehension. First,
such data come from studies that control message content across
listening and reading. They do not address the question of whether
fundamental differences between typical speech exchanges and typi-
cal written texts might play a significant role in comprehension. We
know there are differences between written and oral language in
terms of their social processes. The differences and similarities be-
tween written and oral language have been discussed by numerous
researchers (Kamhi and Catts, 1989; D.R. Olson, 1977; Tannen,
1982; Sulzby, 1985a, 1987; Perfetti, 1985; Rubin, 1980; Galda et
al., 1997).
Second, the high correlations between reading and listening com-
prehension occur after the child has learned how to decode. Third,
correlations inform us about variability across a population, not
within specific individuals. Thus, on the basis of the correlations

among adults, the shared variance between listening and reading

comprehension may be as much as 80 percent. For children, the
shared variance may be somewhat smaller, for example, around 50
percent in fifth grade, approaching adult levels subsequently. This
does not mean that a given individual reads as well as he or she
listens. The gap between one’s listening and reading comprehension
can in fact be quite large, even when the correlation between the two
is quite strong.
Word Identification
The identification of printed words has long been treated as a
skill that is essential for novice readers, yet it remains important in
skilled adult reading as well and is a necessary (but not sufficient)
factor for comprehension. By “word identification,” we mean that
the reader can pronounce a word, not whether he or she knows what
it means.
For a skilled reader, the identification of a printed word begins
with a visual process that operates on the visual forms of letters that
make up a word. The visual process is constrained by the sensitivity
of the retina, such that visual forms are perceived sufficiently for
identification only within a relatively narrow region (the fovea).
Studies of eye movements suggest that readers can correctly perceive
only 5 to 10 letters to the right of the fixation point (McConkie and
Rayner, 1975; Rayner and Pollatsek, 1987). The effect of this limi-
tation is that readers’ eyes must come to rest (fixate) on many words.
Visual processes initiate word identification and immediately trig-
ger other processes that complete it, including, most importantly,
phonological decoding processes, which concern the correspondences
between printed letters and the sounds of the language, especially
phonemes, the small sound units within spoken and heard words.
The research on reading in alphabetic writing systems has developed
an important consensus that phonological decoding is a routine part
of skilled word identification. How the phonological and visual-
orthographic information gets combined for the identification of
individual words has been the focus of much research, fueled in
recent years by theoretical debates about how to conceptualize the

cognitive mechanisms of word identification (Besner, 1990, in press;

Coltheart et al., 1993; Paap and Noel, 1991; Plaut et al., 1996;
Seidenberg and McClelland, 1989). The various models, although
they appear dramatically different, can explain many of the same
facts about reading and about reading failure (Plaut et al., 1996).
Generally speaking, what we know about word identification and its
development is based more on the common ground of these models
than on their differences.
One thing that is especially clear from the research that under-
pins the models is that skilled readers develop both a knowledge of
how spelling patterns correspond to possible word pronunciations
and a sensitivity, based on experience, to the relative frequency of
printed word and subword forms. The only issue is the extent to
which sublexical phonology (pronouncing portions of words based
on a string of letters within the word) actually plays a role in the
retrieval of word meaning from memory. Some work suggests there
is substantial phonological mediation (Berent and Perfetti, 1995;
Lesch and Pollatsek, 1993; Lukatela and Turvey, 1990; van Orden
et al., 1990); other paradigms generate findings suggesting that pho-
nological mediation occurs only some of the time (Besner, 1990;
Coltheart et al., 1991; Paap and Noel, 1991; Waters and Seidenberg,
1985). Even results suggesting that some word retrieval can occur
without phonological mediation are consistent with the assumptions
that (a) phonology is automatically activated during the identifica-
tion process and (b) phonological word forms are retrieved along
with meanings.2 In addition to supporting word identification, pho-
nological processing during reading supports comprehension and
memory for recently read text (Slowiaczek and Clifton, 1980; Perfetti
and McCutchen, 1982).
Word identification research has provided information about
how words are understood as well as how their phonological form is
initially identified from print. Word meanings and sometimes their
pronunciations are necessarily context dependent; for example,
2Indeed, it is becoming clear that, even in nonalphabetic systems, simple word identifica-
tion brings about an activation of the phonology of the word form, even if the reader’s task is
to determine meaning (Perfetti and Zhang, 1995).

“spring” can refer to a season of the year or a coiled piece of metal,

and “read” can be pronounced like “reed” or “red.” Context is
important in interpreting the meaning of a word in a sentence, and
skilled readers do this more efficiently than less skilled readers
(Gernsbacher, 1993). However, it is equally important to note the
limits of context. Skilled readers do not skip many words when they
read texts (Rayner and Pollatsek, 1989), despite the potential that
context might provide for doing so. Indeed the percentage of words
in texts that skilled readers look directly at is quite high, ranging
from above 50 percent to 80 percent across a range of reading situ-
ations (Rayner and Pollatsek, 1989). The benefits of context seem to
be mainly on the amount of time a reader spends on a given word—
the duration of fixation—with only slight effects on the probability
of a word fixation. And, although skilled readers are very good at
using context to figure out the meaning of a word, it is less skilled
readers who attempt to make the greater use of context to identify a
word (Stanovich et al., 1981; Perfetti et al., 1979).
Finally, experience builds automaticity at word identification,
and it appears to establish an important lexical-orthographic source
of knowledge for reading (Stanovich and West, 1989). This lexical-
orthographic knowledge centers on the letters that form the printed
word and is tapped by tasks that assess spelling knowledge, as op-
posed to tasks that tap mainly phonological knowledge. It can be
most easily indexed by the amount of reading a person has done
(Stanovich and West, 1989). The phonological decoding and lexi-
cal-orthographic abilities are correlated, but each makes unique con-
tributions to reading achievement. There are two complementary
but overlapping kinds of knowledge that support the identification
of words: one is grounded in knowledge of the phonological struc-
ture of spoken words and knowledge of how orthographic units
represent these structures. The other develops with the experience
(made possible by the first) of reading printed word forms. These
two types of knowledge may derive from related kinds of learning,
however, since theories of word identification include both single-
process and dual-process accounts of how a reader can come to
know both individual word forms and general procedures for con-
verting letter strings into phonological forms.

BEGINNING TO READ
Emerging Literacy in the Transition to School
When children go to school, they find a social, emotional, and

intellectual structure different from the one at home. They join a
group in which they have new rights and new responsibilities. There
are over 20 others who are somewhat like them, with whom they can
be compared for better or worse. There are routines and structures.
There is only one adult, and there is talk that is separated from
familiar routines. There are expectations—from the child, the child’s
family, the teacher, and the curriculum. In light of these many
challenges, it is not surprising that the experience a child has during
the first year of schooling has lasting impact on school performance
(Alexander and Entwisle, 1996; Pianta and McCoy, 1997).
The acquisition of “real” reading typically begins at about age 5
to 7, after the child has entered kindergarten. Schools with greater
concentrations of urban minority students may send approximately
half of their students to second grade not yet reading conventionally,
although these students may be memorizing and then recognizing
some words as whole units (i.e., sight words).
The transition to real reading involves changes not only in the
composition of skills but also in concepts about the nature of literacy
(Chall, 1983). Adjusting to formal instruction in a school setting is
mediated by the child’s broadening of his or her concept of literacy,
extending it to the new school culture. The purposes and practices
of literacy and language in classrooms necessarily differ from those
in any home, and all children entering school must adjust to the
culture of the school if they are to become successful achievers in
that milieu (Heath, 1983). This transition is likely to be less difficult
for a child whose home literacy experiences and verbal interactions
more closely resemble what goes on in the classroom than for a child
whose prior conceptualization of the role of literacy has been at-
tained through experiences of a much different sort. Gradually the
curriculum emphasis shifts, and students find they are engaged in a
wide range of literacy activities and are responsible for doing them

well, all involving the common core of the reading on which they
begin work in the early grades.
Most 5-year-olds from supportive literacy backgrounds continue
to make rapid growth in literacy skills. Children who are, as Hiebert
(1994) puts it, dependent on schooling for literacy, or who have
spent four or more years without rich support for literacy, will tend
to show patterns more like younger children. However, when such
children are asked or enticed into doing tasks such as “reading your
own way” or “writing your own way,” they do respond in interpret-
able ways rather than showing no knowledge.
Children during this period will “read” from books that have
been read to them frequently, increasingly showing the intonation
and wording patterns of written language in their pretend readings
(Purcell-Gates, 1991). Initially, they act as if pictures are what one
looks at when reading aloud from familiar stories (Sulzby, 1985b,
1994). When watching an adult read silently, they may insist that
something be said for reading to take place (Ferreiro and Teberosky
(1982), but five-year-olds increasingly engage in intensive scrutiny of
the pictures in a page-by-page fashion, as if reading silently before
they begin to “read to” another aloud in an emergent fashion. Some
of these emergent readings will focus on pictures as the source of the
text, but increasing numbers will begin to attend to the print.
Print-focused emergent readings are significant in a number of
ways. Children may temporarily refuse to read, saying that it is the
print that is read and they do not know how to do that. Or they may
temporarily read by focusing solely on an isolated feature of reading,
such as sounding out real words or nonsense strings with signs of
great satisfaction, picking out isolated strings of sight vocabulary
words, or tracking the print while reciting text parts that do not
match the print. These reading behaviors appear to indicate a period
during which the child is bringing together to the text bits and pieces
of knowledge about how print works from other contexts, such as
play, writing, and environmental print (Sulzby, 1985b, 1994).
Children’s writing also takes great strides forward during this
period. Children appear to move across various forms of writing
even up to grade 1, using scribble, nonphonetic letter strings, and
drawing as forms of writing from which they subsequently read.

They plan their compositions to various degrees and respond to

adults who ask them what they plan to write. They tend to hold to
a plan and then read back consistent with that plan at this age, even
though the writing cannot be read by another conventionally. As
children become more proficient writers, they also often go through
a period or periods of insisting on “writing it the right way,” asking
for conventional spellings. Others simply show their growing aware-
ness of the difference between invented and conventional spelling by
the growing numbers and/or categories of words that they spell con-
ventionally (Sulzby, 1996).
During this period, writing tends to become an active arena in
which children practice their increasing ability to read convention-
ally, albeit from familiar texts. Children identify letters and learn
letter-sound correspondences. Invented spelling signals an impor-
tant breakthrough. The knowledge of letters, sounds, and words
that has been developing from the earliest years appears to begin to
make some conventional sense to children. During kindergarten and
first grade, many, if not all children who are allowed to, begin to
write using phonetically based invented or creative spelling (Read,
1971; Chomsky, 1970, 1972; Henderson, 1981; Sulzby et al., 1989;
Clay, 1975, 1979; Bissex, 1980). An interesting phenomenon ap-
pears to take place: children seem to first encode phonetically in
early invented spelling; then there is a lag, during which time they
reread their own text without making use of their phonetic encod-
ing. Soon, however, they begin to decode phonetically as well
(Kamberelis and Sulzby, 1988). Children’s early writing shows the
abstractions they are making about the writing systems of their cul-
ture—and reveals how children form new understandings and solve
problems creatively in the process of becoming real readers.
Learning to Identify Words in Print
Beginning
Some research has demonstrated that 5-year-old children associ-

ate features of print with spoken word names without any indication
that they are using the orthography of the word (Gough, 1993;

Gough and Juel, 1991). Children learned, in one experiment, to

“recognize” a word by use of a thumbprint placed on a card contain-
ing a printed word. When the thumbprint was absent, so was recog-
nition. In another experiment, children were found to use selective
parts of the printed word to associate to the spoken word. In fact,
children who could “recognize” the word when only the first letters
were presented were unable to recognize the word when only the
final letters were presented, and vice versa. This study suggests that
attending to all the letters of a word is not something that all chil-
dren do at the beginning, at least when only selective attention is
necessary for the task. The study does not imply that the child
cannot use letter forms and associated speech forms at that age. It
merely shows that, in the absence of reading instruction and knowl-
edge of letter-sound correspondences, children can approach a read-
ing task by solving the problem of memorizing words but without
learning how the system works. Moving to productive reading re-
quires more than this attempt to memorize on the basis of nonpro-
ductive associations between parts of printed words and their spo-
ken equivalents.
Becoming Productive
Addressing the early stages of learning to read, researchers argue

that children move from a prereading stage, marked by “reading”
environmental print (logos, for example, such as MacDonald’s or
Pepsi), into true reading through an intermediate stage, referred to as
phonetic cue reading (Ehri, 1980, 1991; Ehri and Wilce, 1985, 1987).
In this intermediate stage, the child begins to use the phonetic values
of the names of letters as a representation of the word. For example,
children can learn to read the word “jail” by picking out the salient
first and last letters, j and l, and associating the letter names, “jay”
and “ell” with sounds heard when the word “jail” is pronounced.
This kind of reading is viewed as a primitive form of decoding (or
what Gough and Hillinger, 1980, called “deciphering”)—decoding
because it uses systematic relationships between letters and speech
segments in words, and primitive because it is a strategy that ignores
some of the letters and also because it maps letter names rather than

the phoneme values of the letters. In the full decoding or deciphering

stage, children begin to attend to all letters and to map them to
phonemes. Although these phonemes are not always the right ones,
the child is then in the stage of full productive reading, because he or
she is applying the alphabetic principle very generally across encoun-
ters with words.
Frith (1985) has proposed a stage model that provided frame-
work for both reading and spelling development. In this model,
children first read and write “logographically,” using images of
whole words; they then adopt an alphabetic stance to both reading
and spelling, using letter-to-sound correspondence in reading and
sound-to-letter correspondence in spelling. Finally, they adopt an
orthographic stance, recognizing that spellings often do not reflect
pronunciations directly and that reading requires attention to word-
specific orthographic information. Perhaps most important in Frith’s
framework is the idea that a stage change in reading drives a corre-
sponding stage change in spelling and vice versa. Ellis (1997) has
recently concluded that longitudinal research provides some support
for the predictions of this model.
These early connections between print and speech forms can
drive a rapid transition to real reading. Indeed, the combination of
these print-sound connections along with phonological sensitivity
are critical factors in reading acquisition (Bradley and Bryant, 1983;
Ehri and Sweet, 1991; Juel et al., 1986; Share, 1995; Tunmer et al.,
1988). Studies by Stuart and Coltheart (1988) and Stuart (1990)
illustrate the importance of these early phonologically based ap-
proaches to reading. The extent to which children made phonologi-
cal errors (e.g., “big” for “beg”) in word reading early in the first
grade predicted end-of-year reading achievement. Nonphonological
errors—including errors that shared letters but not in-position pho-
nemes (e.g., “like” for “milk”)—were associated with low end-of-
year achievement. The point at which phonologically similar errors
became more common than nonphonological errors coincided with
the child’s attainment of functional phonological skill, measured by
knowledge of at least half the alphabet and of success in at least
some tests of phonological sensitivity. Stuart (1990) added to these
results by finding that the level of a child’s phonological sensitivity

corresponded in some detail to the level of achievement in word

reading.
The idea that errors can be useful in diagnosing a child’s reading
strategies as well as his or her skills is one developed by Goodman
and Burke (1972) in pioneering work with children reading texts
aloud. In miscue analysis, a child’s omissions, substitutions, and
additions and self-corrections in oral reading provide a window on
the extent to which children are monitoring for meaning, attending
to spelling-sound correspondences, etc. The pattern of miscues can
be informative to teachers and researchers.
Becoming Fully Productive
Truly productive reading, the ability to read novel words, comes

only from an increase in orthographic representations that include
phonology. This requires attention to letter strings and the context-
sensitive association of phoneme sequences to these letter strings.
This is where phonological sensitivity should play its most important
role. Children who have attained this level of reading can read
pronounceable nonwords, and their errors in word reading show a
high degree of phonological plausibility.
An important aspect of learning to identify words may be sensi-
tivity to morphology. The morphological structure of English al-
lows systematic changes in word forms to be associated with system-
atic changes in word meanings. For example, “dislike” is related to
“like,” and “undo” is related to “do.” Most of the time, phonology
(pronunciation) reflects spellings, so words that are morphologically
related share spellings and pronunciations, as in the examples in the
preceding sentence. Other times, however, the pronunciations
change systematically with morphological changes, and the underly-
ing morphology is preserved through spelling. For example, “na-
tional” preserves the root spelling of “nation” while altering the first
vowel sound. Certainly readers, like speakers and listeners, develop
some sensitivity to a wide range of morphological relations.
The research on word identification has explored whether words
are identified based on their morphological structure, that is, whether
some kind of morphological decomposition process accompanies

printed word identification. One view is that words are represented

as full forms without reference to their morphological constituents
(Butterworth, 1983; Osgood and Hoosain, 1974). An alternative
view, more widely held, is that morphemes contribute to word read-
ing. Whether words are decomposed into morphological compo-
nents before or after word recognition is a further question (e.g.,
Fowler et al., 1985; Feldman, 1994; Taft and Forster, 1975; Taft,
1992). Whether the morpheme is a unit of processing and mental
organization is the question, and this question has proved difficult to
answer in a simple manner.
How morphology is actually used in skilled word identification
is probably less important for learning to read than the awareness of
morphology that a child can use to support learning words. Along
with syntax (the structure of sentences), morphology (the structure
of words within a sentence) provides a grammatical foundation for
linking forms and meanings in a systematic way. For reading words,
morphology is especially important because it connects word form
and meaning within the structure of sentences. For example, chil-
dren learn that events that have already occurred are marked by
morphological inflections such as -ed. For children, sensitivity to
morphology may be an important support for skill in reading and
spelling. Research by Nunes et al. (1997) has identified a series of
stages that characterize the development of children’s spelling of
simple inflectional morphology, such as the -ed that signals past
tense of regular English verbs. For words like “kiss” and “kissed,”
for example, children appear to progress from phonetic spelling of
the past tense (kist) to a morphological spelling (kissed). Notice that
phonetically, “kissed” and “soft” have identical endings. Children
may learn the -ed spelling and overgeneralize it to produce “sofed”
as well as “kissed,” before learning to use ed specifically for regular
past tenses. The key development here may be an increased sensitiv-
ity to parts of speech, a “morphosyntactic awareness” that allows
fuller use of the linguistic system in spelling (Nunes et al., 1997).
Thus, although phonological sensitivity is critical for the discovery
of the alphabetic principle (and is reflected in very early spellings), a
fuller sensitivity to the syntactic system may be critical to a full
mastery of English spelling.

Progress in Fluency and Automaticity
Gaining fluency in reading entails developing rapid and perhaps

automatic word identification processes (LaBerge and Samuels,
1974). The main mechanism for gains in automaticity is, in some
form or another, practice at consistent input-output mappings
(Schneider and Shiffrin, 1977). In reading, automaticity entails
“practice” at word identification, such as frequent retrievals of word
forms and meanings from print. On a word-based account of read-
ing acquisition, automaticity is a characteristic of words, not read-
ers. Words move from the functional lexicon to the autonomous
lexicon in this perspective (Perfetti, 1992). These gains from experi-
ence normally come from accumulating normal reading activity cen-
tered on reading text of increasingly greater complexity.
Progress in Understanding
For children learning to read, comprehension can take advantage

of skills they have been using in their oral language: the shared basic
language components (lexical, syntactic, and interpretive processes),
cognitive mechanisms (working memory), and conceptual knowl-
edge (vocabulary, topic knowledge). As mentioned earlier, reading
comprehension skills are at first limited by unskilled decoding; later,
comprehension when reading and when listening to a text are highly
correlated; still later, the advantage of listening over reading disap-
pears and, in some cases, for some kinds of texts and purposes,
reverses (Curtis, 1980). But in the beginning, many tricks of the
trade that children have as native speakers will help a great deal.
Moreover, early books can be well designed to support the child’s
engagement and curiosity and keep the process going.
Theories of individual differences among both younger and older
readers have emphasized, in one way or another, the dependence of
higher levels of comprehension on high levels of skill in elementary
word identification processes (Perfetti, 1985) and processes required
to manage limitations in functional working memory (Just and Car-
penter, 1992; Gernsbacher, 1993; Perfetti, 1985; Shankweiler and
Crain, 1986). Of course, systematic differences between oral lan-

guage and written language may produce some difficulties for learn-
ing to comprehend what one reads, and limits on background knowl-
edge or a lean conceptual vocabulary can affect some text passages
and not others. It is not clear that limits on inferencing processes for
reading- and comprehension-monitoring strategies can be viewed as
independent of the powerful effect of knowledge—background and
word knowledge as well as knowledge of the features of written
language that are not in the child’s oral language repertoire.
Research on what young good comprehenders do is not as far
along as research on children’s word processing. Studies that con-
trast skilled and less skilled comprehenders have shown that skilled
comprehenders are better at decoding (e.g., Perfetti, 1985), have
superior global language comprehension (Smiley et al., 1977), and
have superior metacognitive skills (Paris and Myers, 1981). As
Stothard and Hulme (1996:95) note, though, many studies use mea-
sures of comprehension that “confound decoding and comprehen-
sion difficulties” and are less useful for identifying the crucial fea-
tures of skilled comprehension in children. Few studies have been
completely successful, however, in avoiding this confound. Some
studies have matched subjects on decoding measured in oral reading
by counting errors.
In a series of studies of 7- and 8-year-olds in English schools,
Yuill and Oakhill (1991) compared children matched for chrono-
logical age and for reading accuracy but who differed significantly in
reading comprehension on a standardized norm-referenced test that
measures the two aspects of reading separately. The skilled com-
prehenders (at or slightly above the level expected for their chrono-
logical age in comprehension) were notable for the work they did
with the words and sentences they encountered in texts. For ex-
ample, they understood pronoun references, made proper inferences
about the text from particular words, drew more global inferences
from elements of the text that were not adjacent, detected inconsis-
tencies in texts, applied background knowledge, and monitored their
comprehension.
Stothard and Hulme (1996) compared similarly identified skilled
and less-skilled comprehenders but included a comprehension age
match for the less skilled as well and found an additional feature:

skilled comprehenders (and the comprehension-age-matched chil-

dren) had strong verbal semantic skills, whereas the less skilled
comprehenders were better at performance IQ than verbal. Stothard
and Hulme suggest that high verbal abilities facilitate vocabulary
learning from context, so that children with high verbal ability know
more words to begin with, can read them, and when they encounter
unknown words in their reading can also learn from them.
Cain (1996), also comparing 7- and 8-year-olds who differed in
comprehension while being matched on word errors in context,
added comprehension age match in studying story knowledge in
reading comprehension. In a study of story production, skilled
comprehenders and the comprehension-age-matched children told
stories with the events more integrated when the prompt was simply
a title. When the prompt for the story was a sequence of pictures
that provided an integrating structure, the less skilled comprehenders
performed better and the difference between them and their compre-
hension-age matches disappeared. Cain also interviewed the chil-
dren about the parts of stories that they encounter in reading. Skilled
comprehenders had more formed ideas of the information that can
be gleaned from a title and definite expectations that the beginning
of a story will provide information needed to understand characters,
setting, and plot.
Up to and including third grade, children are learning to monitor
their comprehension. It is clear that these skills can improve with
training (e.g., Elliott-Faust and Pressley, 1986; Miller, 1985;
Palincsar and Brown, 1984; Paris et al., 1984). Baker (1996) showed
that providing information and examples about what kinds of diffi-
culties might be encountered in a passage helped children to identify
them, but that children in grade 3 worked with a smaller range of
types of difficulty than did children in grade 5.
Tracing the development of reading comprehension to show the
necessary and sufficient conditions to prevent reading difficulty is
not as well researched as other aspects of reading growth. In fact, as
Cain (1996) notes, “because early reading instruction emphasizes
word recognition rather than comprehension, the less skilled
comprehenders’ difficulties generally go unnoticed by their class-
room teachers.” It may well be that relieving the bottleneck from

poor word recognition skills will reveal, for some children, stop-
pages in other areas that create comprehension problems; more re-
search is called for on factors related to comprehension growth from
birth to age 8 that may produce problems as children read to learn in
elementary school.
The “fourth-grade slump” is a term used to describe a widely
encountered disappointment when examining scores of fourth grad-
ers in comparison with younger children (see Chall et al., 1990).
Whether looking at test scores or other performance indicators, there
is sometimes a decline in the rate of progress or a decrease in the
number of children achieving at good levels reported for fourth grad-
ers. It is not clear what the explanation is or even if there is a unitary
explanation. The most obvious but probably least likely explana-
tion would be that some children simply stop growing in reading at
fourth grade.
Two other explanations are more likely. One possibility is that
the slump is an artifact; that is, the tasks in school and the tasks in
assessment instruments may change so much between third and
fourth grade that it is not sensible to compare progress and success
on such different tasks and measures. It may be that the true next
stage of what is measured in third grade is not represented in the
fourth-grade data and that the true precedents for the fourth-grade
data are not represented in the third-grade data.
A second possibility is that it is not so much a fourth-grade
slump as a “primary-grade streak,” that is, that some children have
problems in the earlier years that are hidden while so much else is
being learned, in the same way that a tendency to make errors in the
outfield does not bother a ball club while the pitching staff is having
a streak of strikeouts. Previously “unimportant” reading difficulties
may appear for the first time in fourth grade when the children are
dealing more frequently, deeply, and widely with nonfiction materi-
als in a variety of school subjects and when these are represented in
assessment instruments. It may be that there had been less call for
certain knowledge and abilities until fourth grade and a failure to
thrive in those areas might not be noticed until then. It is, of course,
this latter possibility that is important for preventing reading diffi-

culties, and more attention needs to be paid to research on the fourth-

grade slump.
CONCLUSION
Table 2-2 shows a set of particular accomplishments that the
successful learner is likely to exhibit during the early school years.
This list is neither exhaustive nor incontestable, but it does capture
many highlights of the course of reading acquisition that have been
revealed through several decades of research. Needless to say, the
timing of these accomplishments will to some extent depend on the
particular curriculum provided by a school. For example, in many
areas of the country, the kindergarten year is not mandatory and
little formal reading instruction is provided until the start of first
grade. The summary sketch provided by the table of the typical
accomplishments related to reading over the first years of a child’s
schooling presupposes, of course, appropriate familial support and
access to effective educational resources. At the same time, there are
enormous individual differences in children’s progression from play-
ing with refrigerator letters to reading independently, and many path-
ways that can be followed successfully.
Ideally, the child comes to reading instruction with well-devel-
oped language abilities, a foundation for reading acquisition, and
varied experiences with emergent literacy. The achievement of real
reading requires knowledge of the phonological structures of lan-
guage and how the written units connect with the spoken units.
Phonological sensitivity at the subword level is important in this
achievement. Very early, children who turn out to be successful in
learning to read use phonological connection to letters, including
letter names, to establish context-dependent phonological connec-
tions, which allow productive reading. An important mechanism for
this is phonological recoding, which helps the child acquire high-
quality word representations. Gains in fluency (automaticity) come
with increased experience, as does increased lexical knowledge that
supports word identification.
Briefly put, we can say that children need simultaneous access to
some knowledge of letter-sound relationships, some sight vocabu-

TABLE 2-2 Accomplishments in Reading
Kindergarten Accomplishments
• Knows the parts of a book and their functions.
• Begins to track print when listening to a familiar text being read or
when rereading own writing.
• “Reads” familiar texts emergently, i.e., not necessarily verbatim from
the print alone.
• Recognizes and can name all uppercase and lowercase letters.
• Understands that the sequence of letters in a written word represents
the sequence of sounds (phonemes) in a spoken word (alphabetic
principle).
• Learns many, thought not all, one-to-one letter sound correspondences.
• Recognizes some words by sight, including a few very common ones (a,
the, I, my, you, is, are).
• Uses new vocabulary and grammatical constructions in own speech.
• Makes appropriate switches from oral to written language situations.
• Notices when simple sentences fail to make sense.
• Connects information and events in texts to life and life to text
experiences.
• Retells, reenacts, or dramatizes stories or parts of stories.
• Listens attentively to books teacher reads to class.
• Can name some book titles and authors.
• Demonstrates familiarity with a number of types or genres of text (e.g.,
storybooks, expository texts, poems, newspapers, and everyday print
such as signs, notices, labels).
• Correctly answers questions about stories read aloud.
• Makes predictions based on illustrations or portions of stories.
• Demonstrates understanding that spoken words consist of a sequences
of phonemes.
• Given spoken sets like “dan, dan, den” can identify the first two as
being the same and the third as different.
• Given spoken sets like “dak, pat, zen” can identify the first two as
sharing a same sound.
• Given spoken segments can merge them into a meaningful target word.
• Given a spoken word can produce another word that rhymes with it.
• Independently writes many uppercase and lowercase letters.
• Uses phonemic awareness and letter knowledge to spell independently
(invented or creative spelling).
• Writes (unconventionally) to express own meaning.
• Builds a repertoire of some conventionally spelled words.
• Shows awareness of distinction between “kid writing” and
conventional orthography.
• Writes own name (first and last) and the first names of some friends or
classmates.
• Can write most letters and some words when they are dictated.

TABLE 2-2 Continued
First-Grade Accomplishments
• Makes a transition from emergent to “real” reading.
• Reads aloud with accuracy and comprehension any text that is
appropriately designed for the first half of grade 1.
• Accurately decodes orthographically regular, one-syllable words and
nonsense words (e.g., sit, zot), using print-sound mappings to sound
out unknown words.
• Uses letter-sound correspondence knowledge to sound out unknown
words when reading text.
• Recognizes common, irregularly spelled words by sight (have, said,
where, two).
• Has a reading vocabulary of 300 to 500 words, sight words and easily
sounded out words.
• Monitors own reading and self-corrects when an incorrectly identified
word does not fit with cues provided by the letters in the word or the
context surrounding the word.
• Reads and comprehends both fiction and nonfiction that is
appropriately designed for grade level.
• Shows evidence of expanding language repertory, including increasing
appropriate use of standard more formal language registers.
• Creates own written texts for others to read.
• Notices when difficulties are encountered in understanding text.
• Reads and understands simple written instructions.
• Predicts and justifies what will happen next in stories.
• Discusses prior knowledge of topics in expository texts.
• Discusses how, why, and what-if questions in sharing nonfiction texts.
• Describes new information gained from texts in own words.
• Distinguishes whether simple sentences are incomplete or fail to make
sense; notices when simple texts fail to make sense.
• Can answer simple written comprehension questions based on material
read.
• Can count the number of syllables in a word.
• Can blend or segment the phonemes of most one-syllable words.
• Spells correctly three- and four-letter short vowel words.
• Composes fairly readable first drafts using appropriate parts of the
writing process (some attention to planning, drafting, rereading for
meaning, and some self-correction).
• Uses invented spelling/phonics-based knowledge to spell independently,
when necessary.
• Shows spelling consciousness or sensitivity to conventional spelling.
• Uses basic punctuation and capitalization.
• Produces a variety of types of compositions (e.g., stories, descriptions,
journal entries), showing appropriate relationships between printed
text, illustrations, and other graphics.
• Engages in a variety of literary activities voluntarily (e.g., choosing
books and stories to read, writing a note to a friend).

TABLE 2-2 Continued
Second-Grade Accomplishments
• Accurately decodes orthographically regular multisyllable words and
nonsense words (e.g., capital, Kalamazoo).
• Uses knowledge of print-sound mappings to sound out unknown
words.
• Accurately reads many irregularly spelled words and such spelling
patterns as diphthongs, special vowel spellings, and common word
endings.
• Shows evidence of expanding language repertory, including increasing
use of more formal language registers.
• Reads voluntarily for interest and own purposes.
• Rereads sentences when meaning is not clear.
• Interprets information from diagrams, charts, and graphs.
• Recalls facts and details of texts.
• Reads nonfiction materials for answers to specific questions or for
specific purposes.
• Takes part in creative responses to texts such as dramatizations, oral
presentations, fantasy play, etc.
• Discusses similarities in characters and events across stories.
• Connects and compares information across nonfiction selections.
• Poses possible answers to how, why, and what-if questions.
• Correctly spells previously studied words and spelling patterns in own
writing.
• Represents the complete sound of a word when spelling independently.
• Shows sensitivity to using formal language patterns in place of oral
language patterns at appropriate spots in own writing (e.g.,
decontextualizing sentences, conventions for quoted speech, literary
language forms, proper verb forms).
• Makes reasonable judgments about what to include in written
products.
• Productively discusses ways to clarify and refine writing of own and
others.
• With assistance, adds use of conferencing, revision, and editing
processes to clarify and refine own writing to the steps of the expected
parts of the writing process.
• Given organizational help, writes informative well-structured reports.
˙ • Attends to spelling, mechanics, and presentation for final products.
• Produces a variety of types of compositions (e.g., stories, reports,
correspondence).

TABLE 2-2 Continued
Third-Grade Accomplishments
• Reads aloud with fluency and comprehension any text that is appro-
priately designed for grade level.
• Uses letter-sound correspondence knowledge and structural analysis to
decode words.
• Reads longer fictional selections and chapter books independently.
• Takes part in creative responses to texts such as dramatizations, oral
presentations, fantasy play, etc.
• Can point to or clearly identify specific words or wordings that are
causing comprehension difficulties.
• Summarizes major points from fiction and nonfiction texts.
• In interpreting fiction, discusses underlying theme or message.
• Asks how, why, and what-if questions in interpreting nonfiction texts.
• In interpreting nonfiction, distinguishes cause and effect, fact and
opinion, main idea and supporting details.
• Uses information and reasoning to examine bases of hypotheses and
opinions.
• Infers word meanings from taught roots, prefixes, and suffixes.
• Correctly spells previously studied words and spelling patterns in own
writing.
• Begins to incorporate literacy words and language patterns in own
writing (e.g., elaborates descriptions, uses figurative wording).
• With some guidance, uses all aspects of the writing process in
producing own compositions and reports.
• Combines information from multiple sources in writing reports.
• With assistance, suggests and implements editing and revision to clarify
and refine own writing.
• Presents and discusses own writing with other students and responds
helpfully to other students’ compositions.
• Independently reviews work for spelling, mechanics, and presentation.
• Produces a variety of written works (e.g., literature responses, reports,
“published” books, semantic maps) in a variety of formats, including
multimedia forms.

lary, and some comprehension strategies. In each case, “some”

indicates that exhaustive knowledge of these aspects is not needed to
get the child reading conventionally; rather, each child seems to need
varying amounts of knowledge to get started, but then he or she
needs to build up the kind of inclusive and automatic knowledge
that will let the fact that reading is being done fade into the back-
ground while the reasons for reading are fulfilled.

INTRODUCTION TO READING 85
PART II
Who Are We Talking About?
Who has reading difficulties and what are the factors present in
early childhood that predict failure and success in reading? Part II
addresses these questions.
Large numbers of school-age children, including children from
all social classes, have significant difficulties in learning to read. To
clarify this statement, we outline a number of conceptual issues in
identifying and measuring reading difficulties in young children.
Categorical and dimensional approaches to estimating reading diffi-
culties are presented, as are prevalence figures.
In a study on preventing reading difficulties, however, it is not
enough to assess actual reading difficulties. Ideally, we want to
know which children or groups of children will have problems learn-
ing to read when they are in school and given reading instruction.
Effective preventions are necessary for children to receive in their
preschool years, in some cases even starting in infancy—for example,
for children with hearing impairments. Thus, there is a need to
know what factors predict success and failure in learning to read.
We consider predictors that are:
85

• intrinsic to the individual and would be identified by assessing

the child;
• identified in the family environment; and
• associated with the larger environment of the child—the neigh-
borhood, school, and community in which the child lives.

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Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children

THE PROCESS OF LEARNING TO READ 41

The Process of Learning to Read

In this chapter, we review research on the process of reading and

READING AND LITERACY

Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

42 PREVENTING READING DIFFICULTIES IN YOUNG CHILDREN

ited knowledge; in the case of the physics dissertation, for example,

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THE PROCESS OF LEARNING TO READ 43

the ways in which reading and oral language activities complement

DEVELOPMENT BEFORE KINDERGARTEN:

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44 PREVENTING READING DIFFICULTIES IN YOUNG CHILDREN

development via their impact on general development, we focus in

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THE PROCESS OF LEARNING TO READ 45

“Metacognition” refers to thoughts about thinking (cognition); for exam-

Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

46 PREVENTING READING DIFFICULTIES IN YOUNG CHILDREN

learned, when it is learned, and in what kinds of situations learning

Children with intact neurological systems, raised by caring adults

“Phonology” refers to the way sounds of the language operate.

Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

THE PROCESS OF LEARNING TO READ 47

year and probably continues to be refined even in the early school

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48 PREVENTING READING DIFFICULTIES IN YOUNG CHILDREN

Vocabulary size continues to increase with schooling and be-

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THE PROCESS OF LEARNING TO READ 49

tent of the text. The child’s ability to produce and comprehend

Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

50 PREVENTING READING DIFFICULTIES IN YOUNG CHILDREN

sights are applied in all language domains (phonology, syntax, se-

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THE PROCESS OF LEARNING TO READ 51

This sketch of language development and of initial metalinguistic

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52 PREVENTING READING DIFFICULTIES IN YOUNG CHILDREN

The terms phonology and phonological refer to the sound structure of

Phonemes are the speech phonological units that make a difference to

Phonological awareness is a more inclusive term than phonemic aware-

Speech discrimination, including phonemic discrimination, is distin-

The term phonics refers to instructional practices that emphasize how

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THE PROCESS OF LEARNING TO READ 53

an appreciation of alliteration, for instance, that boy and butterfly

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54 PREVENTING READING DIFFICULTIES IN YOUNG CHILDREN

Because of the physical and psychological nature of phonemes as

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THE PROCESS OF LEARNING TO READ 55

ability to perceive other nonspeech sounds, such as tones, environ-

Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

56 PREVENTING READING DIFFICULTIES IN YOUNG CHILDREN

adequate awareness of phonemes, the reading and spelling growth of

Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

THE PROCESS OF LEARNING TO READ 57