Ready to start reading

Most children are ready to start reading by age 5 to 6 years. By that time a child has a vocabulary of several 1000 words in his native language. He knows the grammatical rules of the language.  Most importantly he has developed sophisticated visual and speech circuits in his brain. His brain enters a period of maximal plasticity, which will assist with learning to read among all the other skills he has to learn upon entering formal schooling.

You child will move through three stages of learning to read. The first is the logographic or pictorial stage. In this stage he recognises the written word as an object. He exploits superficial cues such as colour, shape, letter orientation and curvature to "read" the word. He would read words such as:

However, if you change the font, colour or layout the child will no longer be able to read the word. So a child may be able to read "Simba", but not "simba".

Although this is a very artificial form of reading, it is still an important stage. This is the stage where a child realise "hey, I can read!". In my opinion this is an important confidence builder for any young child. Here comes the "but": as teachers we should not over-emphasise this stage to the point where  progress to the next stage is neglected. We should also take note that this stage is quite brief in learning to read in a transparent language, i.e. a language where phoneme-grapheme (letter-sound correspondence) correspondence is regular. During this stage bilateral processing still takes place in the child's brain. 

The next stage is the phonological stage where a child start making the links between the phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters). The child masters phonemic awareness or the awareness that words can be broken into phonemes (sounds) during this stage. In this stage word length and grapheme complexity increases reading time. So longer words will take longer to read. More complex words will also take longer to read. To master this stage a child requires explicit teaching of the alphabetic principle. A child needs to be taught to associate certain sounds with specific graphemes. 

Teachers often wonder what should they teach first the graphemes (letters) or the phonemes (sounds). Here the wonder of our brains steps in again. There is a spiral causality, where grapheme awareness increases phoneme awareness and phoneme awareness increases grapheme awareness. So in short, simultaneous teaching of phonemes and graphemes works best.  

From neuroscience research we know that mastery of the alphabetic principle changes the way the brain is wired. The visual system breaks down words into graphemes (letters), while parts of the speech circuit adapts to explicitly represent the phonemes (sounds). The visual word form area, also known as the left lateral occipito-temporal sulcus develops linking the visual and speech circuits. More about this in the next post. 

We have seen that in the logographic stage a child is likely to make "reading" errors, when the font, colour size, or culvature of a word is changed. In the phonological stage a child is likely to make regularisation mistakes when reading irregular words, e.g. a child will read "said" as "sa it" and "key" as "kay". Children in this reading stage also struggle to read words with complex consonant structures such as CCCVCC forms e.g. the word "strict".

The last stage is the orthographic stage. In this stage reading time is no longer determined by word length or grapheme complexity. However, higher frequency words are however read faster than rare words. Reading fluency and efficiency increases. This is due to parallel processing of up to 8 letters at a time, which results in the illusion of whole word reading. However, the brain still processes every letter in a word.  

In the next post I will address the circuits in the brain activated during reading. I will also answer the question whether we should use the phonic approach, the whole language approach or the balanced reading approach in teaching reading. I would love to hear your opinions and questions. 

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