Stages of Reading: Teaching the Emergent Reader

• When looking at the phases of reading comprehension strategies, vocabulary, and higher level thinking skills must be developed even in the earliest stages.

• Comprehension strategies, vocabulary, concepts and academic language that students will be developing through reading instruction and wide reading must also be intentionally and explicitly taught and modeled orally.

• Children do not yet use alphabetic knowledge to read nor do they understand that letters in words map to sounds in oral language.

• Preschool children and older readers who have little working knowledge of the alphabetic system. Also called the selective cue stage because children select non-alphabetic cues to remember words (Pepsi can or McDonalds sign).

Pre-Alphabetic Phase• Chall’s Stage 0: Prereading.

• Read words from memory only.

• Read words using length of word or size and shape of word.

• Guess words using context.

• Limited knowledge of letters.

• Cannot decode unknown words.

• Do not understand the alphabetic principle, which letters in written words map onto sounds in oral language.

• Pretend to read extended text.

• Guided Reading: predictable text.

• Partial-Alphabetic Phase-Kindergarten, first grade, and older students who have rudimentary working knowledge of the alphabetic system but lack full knowledge, particularly vowel knowledge.

Can match some letters in words to sounds in their pronunciation.

Use guessing strategies to read words.

Decoding strategies are not available for reading unknown words.

• Begin to detect letters in words and use partial alphabetic cues and context to read words. For example, if they see a picture of a playground with a word that begins with s, they may read it as swing.

• Misread words that have similar letters. For example, man for men, house for horse, bat for bet.

• May read saw as was because directionality is not firmly in place.

Standards for Decoding and Word Recognition

Kindergarten Match all consonant and short-vowel

sounds to appropriate letters. Read simple one-syllable and high-

frequency words (i.e., sight words). Understand that as letters of words

change, so do the sounds (i.e., the alphabetic principle).

Grade 1

• Generate the sounds from all the letters and letter patterns, including consonant blends and long- and short-vowel patterns (i.e., phonograms), and blend those sounds into recognizable words.

Read common, irregular sight words (e.g., the, have, said, come, give, of).

Use knowledge of vowel digraphs and r-controlled letter-sound associations to read words.

Read compound words and contractions. Read inflectional forms (e.g., -s, -ed, -ing) and root

words (e.g., look, looked, looking). Read common word families (e.g., -ite, -ate).

Grade 2 Recognize and use knowledge of spelling patterns (e.g.,

diphthongs, special vowel spellings) when reading. Apply knowledge of basic syllabication rules when

reading (e.g., vowel-consonant-vowel = su/per, vowel-consonant/consonant-vowel = sup/per).

Decode two-syllable nonsense words and regular multi-syllable words.

Recognize common abbreviations (e.g., Jan., Sun., Mr., St.).

Identify and correctly use regular plurals (e.g., -s, -es, -ies) and irregular plurals (e.g., fly/flies, wife/wives).

Read aloud fluently and accurately and with appropriate intonation and expression.

Grade 3 Know and use complex word families when

reading (e.g., -ight) to decode unfamiliar words.

Decode regular multi-syllabic words.

Read aloud narrative and expository text fluently and accurately and with appropriate pacing, intonation, and expression.

Grades 4, 5, 6 Read aloud narrative and expository text

fluently and accurately and with appropriate pacing, intonation, and expression.