Reading Development

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Like speech and language, prereading in our culture is acquired through social interaction rather than formal instruction (Pflaum, 1986). Reading together is a highly social activity in which both parents and children participate. The adult uses many conversational techniques for oral language development, including focusing attention, asking questions, and reinforcing the child's attempts at reading.

Emerging Literacy

Reading development begins within social interactions between a child and caregiver(s) at around age 1, as adults begin to share books with toddlers. Book sharing is usually conversational in tone with the book serving as the focus of communication. Here's an example:

ADULT: This a book about a ...

CHILD: Cow.

ADULT: Well, yes. You found a cow. What do cows say?

CHILD: Moo!

ADULT: Um-hm, cows say, "Moo." Can you find another cow?

Reading the story is secondary to and will be included in the conversation. A parent or caregiver mediates the process by modeling responses for a child, by providing feedback, and by talking about both the text and the pictures (van Kleeck & Beckley-McCall, 2002).

Actual text reading by parents usually begins late in the second year or in the third year. A relationship exists between the age of onset of home reading routines and a child's oral language skills, especially oral comprehension (Debaryshe, 1993).

Parent-child reading is not the only way of developing a concept of literacy. Television shows, such as Sesame Street, and parental activities, such as the use of cookbooks and TV schedules or bill paying, are also important. A child learns that books and writing or print convey information. In short, the child gains a notion of literacy.

There are several phases of reading development. In the prereading phase, which occurs prior to age 6, a child gains an awareness of print and sounds while gradually learning to make associations between the two.

By age 3, most children in our culture are familiar with books and can recognize their favorite books. Through book sharing they have gained the rudiments of print awareness, such as knowing the direction in which reading proceeds across a page and through a book, being interested in print, and recognizing some letters (Snow et al., 1999). Later the child will learn that words are discrete units and will be able to identify letters and use literacy terminology, such as letter, word, and sentence.

At this age, words may be stored by their visual features, or the way they look, but children lack knowledge of the phoneme-grapheme (sound-letter) correspondence. The connections in the child's memory for printed words are relatively unsystematic.

For most children, emergent story reading in which a child pretends to read a book or uses a book to tell a story begins between ages 2½ and 4 (Kaderavek & Sulzby, 2000). A child uses the vocabulary and syntax associated with specific books and written elements, such as printed words, in this process, even if the words are not interpreted correctly. Gradually, a child moves from language about the text to language that recreates the text (Sulzby & Zecker, 1991). At this age, my granddaughter could recite several of her favorite books, many of the simple ones word for word.

Most 4-year-olds are "consumers" of print and are able to recognize their names and a few memorized words (Dickinson, Wolf, & Stotsky, 1993). Words learned within one context, such as environmental signs and package labels, gradually become decontextualized until they are recognized in print alone. Approximately 60 percent of 3-year-olds and 80 percent of 4- and 5-year-olds recognize the word stop (Goodman, 1986), and they all probably know McDonald's golden "M." In addition, they gain some general concept that print in books is distinct from the pictures and that books are used in certain ways.