Developmental Trends: Reading at Different Age Levels

Middle Childhood (6–10)

What You Might Observe:

• Ability to hear individual phonemes within words
• Increasing proficiency in identifying unfamiliar words
• Growing sight-word vocabulary, leading to greater reading fluency
• Beginning of silent reading (at age 7 or 8)
• Increasing ability to draw inferences
• Tendency to take things in print at face value

Diversity:

• Children with deficits in phonological awareness have a more difficult time learning to read.
• Children with hearing impairments may be slower to master letter-sound relationships.
• On average, girls develop reading skills earlier than boys.
• Children vary widely in their use of effective comprehension strategies.

Implications:

• Explore “families” of words that are spelled similarly.
• Assign well-written trade books (e.g., children’s paperback novels) as soon as children are able to read and understand them.
• Engage children in discussions about books. Focus on interpretation, inference drawing, and speculation.
• For children who struggle with reading, explicitly teach phonological awareness and word identification skills, especially within the context of meaningful reading activities.

Early Adolescence (10–14)

What You Might Observe:

• Automatized recognition of most common words
• Ability to learn new information through reading
• Emerging ability to go beyond the literal meaning of text
• Emerging metacognitive processes that aid comprehension (e.g., comprehension monitoring, backtracking)

Diversity:

• Adolescents with deficits in phonological awareness continue to lag behind their peers in reading development.
• Individuals who were poor readers in elementary school often continue to be poor readers in adolescence.
• Some individuals (e.g., some with mental retardation) may have excellent word identification skills yet not understand what they read.
• Individuals with sensory challenges may have less general world knowledge that they can use to construct meaning from what they read.

Implications:

• Assign age-appropriate reading materials in various content areas; provide scaffolding (e.g., questions to answer) to guide youngsters’ thinking and learning as they read.
• Begin to explore classic works of poetry and fiction.
• Use reciprocal teaching to promote poor readers’ comprehension skills.
• Seek the advice and assistance of specialists to help promote the reading skills of youngsters who lag far behind their peers.

Late Adolescence (14–18)

What You Might Observe:

• Automatized recognition of many abstract and discipline-specific words
• Ability to consider multiple viewpoints about a single topic
• Ability to critically evaluate what is read
• More sophisticated metacognitive reading strategies

Diversity:

• Poor readers draw few if any inferences from what they read and use few if any effective metacognitive processes.
• As classroom learning becomes more dependent on reading textbooks and other written materials, adolescents with reading disabilities may become increasingly frustrated in their attempts to achieve academic success.
• Girls are more likely than boys to enroll in advanced literature classes.

Implications:

• Expect that many teenagers can learn effectively from textbooks and other reading materials, but continue to scaffold reading assignments, especially for poor readers.
• Encourage adolescents to draw inferences and make predictions from what they read.
• Critically analyze classic works of poetry and fiction.
• Modify reading materials and paper-pencil assessments for individuals with delayed reading development.