Stages of Reading Development
What stages of development do children progress through from infancy to adulthood? You may think of how a child progresses from crawling to walking, or from babbling to speaking single words to forming full sentences. Though children develop at different rates and ages, they follow a general progression as they grow.
The development of reading skills is no different; children progress through distinct stages on their way to becoming fluent, independent readers.
In this video, we will describe four stages of reading development and their associated behaviors. We will also describe instructional practices that can be used to support students in each of these stages.
The Four Stages
Children progress through four distinct stages of reading development: emergent reading, early reading, transitional reading, and fluent reading. People sometimes refer to these stages by other names or divide them further into substages. However they are named, the stages describe the same general skills progression.
As with other areas of growth and development, there are variances in the rate and age at which children move through these stages.
Let’s visit some classrooms to see what students in each stage of reading development are learning and doing.
Stage 1 – Emergent Reading
Mrs. Collins teaches pre-kindergarten. Most of her students are in the emergent stage of reading development. They are learning how to handle a book by holding it right-side up and turning the pages from front to back.
These emergent readers are learning that print holds meaning. Though they can’t decode the printed words, they retell stories in their own words as they turn the pages. They comment on the illustrations and discuss what they like or notice in the stories.
The students are developing some phonemic awareness skills, including the ability to rhyme and use alliteration. They recognize some common words in environmental print, like the names of their favorite restaurants. Some students in the class are beginning to recognize printed letters and identify their related sounds.
Instructional Practices for Emergent Readers
Mrs. Collins uses many instructional practices to strengthen her students’ emergent reading skills. During a read-aloud, she holds the book upright and points out the author and illustrator. She models how to turn the pages, and she points to each word as she reads, showing the one-to-one correspondence between the written and spoken word. To model reading from left to right, she follows along with her finger, moving to the sentence below when she reaches the end of each line.
Mrs. Collins engages in word play frequently, reads poems and nursery rhymes, and asks students to form rhyming pairs. She asks what sounds students hear at the beginning and ending of a word, and she begins introducing them to letter names and sounds.
Stage 2 – Early Reading
Mr. Fuentes teaches first grade. Most of his students are in the early reading stage. They have more developed phonemic awareness skills and are able to identify the beginning, middle, and ending sounds of words. They can also add, remove, or substitute a phoneme in a given word.
These early readers understand the predictable relationship between letters and their sounds and are beginning to decode short words with common spelling patterns. They also recognize some sight words automatically. Using a combination of decoding strategies and sight word knowledge, they are able to read some simple texts independently. After reading or listening to a text, the students can retell some of the main events and share their feelings about the story.
Instructional Practices for Early Readers
Mr. Fuentes uses several instructional strategies to help his early readers increase their skills. He teaches a variety of decoding strategies, including sounding out, breaking words into chunks, and looking for known word parts. He asks students to self-monitor their reading by asking if what they read looks right, sounds right, and makes sense. After reading a story aloud, he asks questions about the characters and events, and he models providing answers using text evidence.
Stage 3 – Transitional Reading
Mr. Thomas teaches second grade. His students are mainly in the transitional stage of reading development. They automatically recognize many spelling patterns and sight words and can decode multisyllabic words using a variety of strategies. The students are also beginning to read simple chapter books and can engage in independent reading for longer periods of time. Their comprehension skills are growing quickly too. In addition to identifying story structure and responding personally to texts, the students are now beginning to make inferences.
Instructional Practices for Transitional Readers
Mr. Thomas introduces his students to a wide variety of text types. He teaches the characteristics of different text structures and shows students how to use text features to find key information. He models his thinking when answering comprehension questions and uses text evidence to support his answers.
Mr. Thomas also models how to analyze vocabulary words for known roots or affixes and how to look for connections in word meanings. Students are reading longer, more complex texts, so fluency practice is important too. Mr. Thomas models reading excerpts from texts and then asks his students to read them independently in the same manner.
Stage 4 – Fluent Reading
Ms. Baxter teaches seventh grade. Most of her students are in the fluent stage of reading development, automatically recognizing most words and using decoding strategies to quickly figure out any words they don’t know. They read at an appropriate speed and with expression. They know the meanings of most vocabulary words they encounter and use context clues, knowledge of roots, or other clues to figure out any they don’t know. The students comprehend complex texts, which they demonstrate through comparing and contrasting, evaluating, summarizing, and other higher-level skills.
Instructional Practices for Fluent Readers
Ms. Baxter teaches her students about a variety of text structures and their characteristics. Together they analyze sentence structure and word choice, such as the use of figurative language.
Ms. Baxter also models higher-level skills like gathering and synthesizing information from multiple sources. She teaches word analysis skills that help her students understand any new vocabulary they encounter.
Review
Now, let’s review what we learned about the stages of reading development.
Children go through four distinct stages of reading development: emergent reading, early reading, transitional reading, and fluent reading. Although the order of the stages remains the same, children progress through these stages at different rates.
Emergent readers begin to understand that print contains meaning and learn to handle books correctly. They have some phonemic awareness skills, including the ability to rhyme, and they begin learning letter names and sounds.
Early readers have more developed phonemic awareness skills. They can decode some simple words using knowledge of letter-sound relationships, and they recognize a growing number of sight words automatically. They can read some simple texts independently.
Transitional readers know many words automatically and use a range of decoding strategies to figure out unknown words. They can read some simple chapter books independently. Transitional readers can also answer more complex comprehension questions, including those requiring inferences.
Fluent readers read a variety of complex texts independently. They have large vocabularies and can answer higher-level comprehension questions.
Review Questions
Let’s go over a few review questions before we go.
1. Describe some differences in instructional practices you might use to build reading comprehension for students in the emergent and fluent stages of reading development.
2. The parent of a student in your kindergarten class expresses concern that her daughter is not yet reading texts independently. How could you address her concerns?
Thanks for watching, and happy studying.
