This site was designed with the .com website builder. Create your website today.
Start Now
!"#$ %!#&' '#()*+
T he Re a di ng A pe
Nu l l i u s i n verba
What lies beneath - child development prior to
reading.
The complexities, challenges and difficulties of
learning to read do not start on a child’s first day
at school. Considerable development will have
occurred before any formal instruction begins.
LANGUAGE EXPOSURE AND EARLY READING
Prior to formal
instruction, children
begin to develop an
awareness of print
before the age of four
and although utilise logographic cues (Frith, 1985)
have been shown to be aware of letter changes in
these logographs (Drum & Ehri, 1984). By four,
most children have an awareness of words by their
figural characteristics and by five years old develop
an awareness of letters within words, especially
within their own names (Levy, 2006) and start to
focus on letter sequences. Although a general
awareness of print may emerge naturally from oral
experiences in a text-rich environment, the claim
that phonological awareness, letter identification,
orthographic knowledge and alphabetic skills are
naturally developing phenomena (Goodman,
1970) is not supported by studies (Levy et al.,
2006; Lonigan et al., 2000).
Children have had up to four years of language
exposure prior to any formal reading instruction.
As seems intuitively cogent, the amount and
quality of this language exposure appears to have
a significant effect on children’s reading
development (Nation & Snowling, 1998; Ouellette,
2006). However, perhaps surprisingly, this is by
increasing vocabulary not by a magical
preparation for exposure to print. Vocabulary
provides the foundation for accurate lexical
representation of print and children with a larger
vocabulary are able to develop phonological
representations earlier (Walley, 1993) and cultivate
a more efficient word recognition process.
Children with poor vocabulary struggle with
reading comprehension (Beck, Perfetti &
McKeown, 1982) and in the Sénnéchal and
LeFevre (2002) study, oral language skills were
highly correlated with reading comprehension
ability in eight and nine-year-olds. So high
quality language exposure assists reading
comprehension…later on.
However, where oral language proficiency
supports early reading development most
significantly is through the effects on the
acquisition of code related skills during pre-school
(Storch & Whitehouse, 2006). There appears to
be little correlation between oral language skills
and early reading ability (Lonigan et al., 2000),
but significant correlation between code-based
skills and early reading (Storch and Whitehouse,
2006). Nation & Cocksey, (2009) surmised that
the critical factor in irregular word reading for
younger readers was not oral language
development but familiarity with the phonological
form.
Studies on young, non-reading children reveal
that they perform poorly on tests that measure
ability to identify individual words in spoken
sentences (Holden & MacGintie, 1972) with
particular difficulties exhibited with the
identification of function words. A lack of
attention to print and the absence of the obvious
segmentation of words by parental readers would
seem to explain the lack of word consciousness in
beginning readers (Mickish, 1974). However, by
the age of five, most children, according to the
Levy et al. (2006) study, are able to comprehend
the characteristics of printed words even though
they may be unable to read.
PHONOLOGICAL AND PHONEMICAL
AWARENESS
The early development of reading is dependent
upon a child being able to map the recorded
symbols of the writing system onto their acquired
oral language knowledge. The phonological
awareness required depends upon the writing
system (McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002). Most
children develop some level of phonological
awareness without instruction (Adams, Treiman &
Pressley, 1998). However, with an alphabetic
system like English, which operates at a letter-to-
sound level, it is phonemic awareness that appears
to influence early reading (Adams, 1990), and
many children do not acquire the necessary skills
for this more atomised awareness without explicit
instruction (Adams, Treiman & Pressley, 1998).
Phonological awareness seems to be a
unidirectional, sequential construct (Anthony et al.,
2002) with children’s awareness of larger units of
sound occurring earlier that smaller units; syllables
are recognised before rimes before phonemes.
Savin (1972) noted that children seem to have
particular difficulty progressing beyond the syllable
level. However, it is phonemic awareness that best
predicts reading ability (Adams, 1990) and Hume
et al. (2005) suggest a causal link between the
two. Furthermore, Bradley and Bryant (1983)
suggest that phonemic sensitivity can be taught to
prereaders. However, there appears to be a
reciprocal relationship between reading experience
and phonemic awareness; the more a child reads
and writes, the greater their exhibited phonemic
sensitivity (Morias et al., 1979).
LETTER KNOWLEDGE
At the most atomised level of an alphabetic writing
system is the letter and Chall (1967) and Bond and
Dykstra (1967) studies indicate that letter
knowledge appears to be a predictor of reading
achievement. Fast and accurate letter
identification affords reduced likelihood of
misidentification of phonemes and greater
likelihood of correct word recognition. Although
the ability to correctly recognise all 26 letters in the
English alphabet is essential for early reading,
there is little evidence that teaching children letter
names improves reading (Rayner et al., 2012).
Good letter naming knowledge seems to indicate
greater levels of print familiarity (Adams, 1990)
with associated benefits for early reading, and
speed and accuracy of letter identification appears
to denote a more general ability to name a broad
spectrum of items effortlessly (Kail & Hall, 1994).
EYE MOVEMENTS OF EARLY READERS
Kowler and Matins’ research (1982) found that
prereading children seem to experience some
difficulty controlling their eye movements with
saccadic latency longer in younger children than
older children. This suggests that children’s
cognitive processes develop to deal with the
progressively more complex demands of reading.
Rayner et al.’s (2002) study indicated that as
reading skill increases, the number of fixations
decreases, fixation duration decreases, and
saccade length grows. However, the suggestion
that improving eye movement patterns through
oculomotor training will improve reading is
potentially misleading. Tinker’s (1958) summary
of eye movement research concluded that eye
movements were not the cause of reading
problems but were the reflection of other
underlying problems, and even in dyslexic readers
with erratic eye movements, these eye movements
do not appear to be the cause of the reading
problem but a consequence of the difficulties
encountered in learning to read (Rayner, 1985;
Stanovich, 1986).
READY TO READ?
Bearing in mind the complexity of skills required to even begin reading, the question arise of when
reading instruction should begin and particularly whether a particularly cognitive threshold should
have been reached. This concept of ‘reading readiness’ has its roots in the early twentieth century with
Huey’s (2012) recommendation that if a child were unable to read a text then it should not be read; ‘Its
very difficulty is the child’s protection against what is as yet unfitted for,’ (2012:57). Dewey (2017)
further recommended that a child need not be exposed to text before the age of eight and in some cases
ten years old. Huey (2012) concurred with the eight-year old threshold and recommended no formal
reading instruction until the habits of spoken language had been well formed; the curriculum would
focus on promoting the desire to read (Diack, 1965). ‘Delay as a teaching technique’ developed into
common educational parlance with the belief that any reading difficulties encountered by the age of
seven would be resolved by cognitive maturation (Anderson and Dearborn, 1952: 345). The age of
seven as a threshold dovetailed with the accessing of Piaget’s (1952) concrete operations stage and
tallied with Dolch and Bloomster’s (1937) observations that children with a mental age below that of
seven were unable to match printed words to spoken words.
However, Rayner et al. 92012) question the validity of reading readiness as a biological construct
arguing that if this were the case, children would begin reading instruction across the world at a
similar age. This is not the case, they argue, with some cultures not starting until seven with others
beginning at five with no consistency across English speaking nations. The age reading instruction
begins is a poor predictor of reading outcomes at age eight and nine. If reading readiness were a
legitimate construct it would be expected that countries (like England) that start instruction early
would report increased reading problems. This is not the case, with England beginning instruction at 5
and the USA at 6 yet both countries reporting similar rates of reading problems. Vaessen et al. (2010) in
their study of Hungarian, Dutch and Portuguese children did not find effects of age that were
independent of years of instruction. The idea that lack of cognitive maturation is at the heart of
reading difficulties thus, does not seem to be supported by empirical studies. What emerges from the
research is that phonological awareness is the strongest predictor of how easily a child will learn to
read.
