Stepping stones to reading

Theory Into Practice, Autumn, 2004 by Margo Bowman, Rebecca Treiman

Even before they are able to read, young children possess many skills that can help pave the way for literacy. For example, preschoolers have sizable spoken vocabularies and often know that English words are read from left to right. The focus of this article is on another type of knowledge that many preschoolers possess--knowledge of the names of alphabet letters. The authors discuss theories and research pertaining to the acquisition of reading skills with an emphasis on recent research evaluating how children use their knowledge of the alphabet in their initial attempts to read and spell. An understanding of the research can help teachers base their instruction on the skills that children already possess and build from there. Educational implications and suggestions for translating theory into practice are discussed.

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DEVELOPING LITERACY SKILLS is an achievement that, once accomplished, will benefit a person throughout his or her lifetime. Unlike speech, which most children acquire naturally through exposure to language, children need explicit instruction to become fluent readers and spellers. Although there have been claims that learning to read a written language should be no harder than learning to speak the spoken language (Goodman, 1986), research consistently shows that the acquisition of literacy involves the gradual accumulation of knowledge about the linguistic and orthographic features of the language and is a process that requires guidance. Understanding the typical pattern of literacy acquisition can facilitate the development of effective instructional methods.

Young children begin to acquire literacy-related skills long before they are able to read or spell individual words. These skills pave the way for an understanding of the alphabetic principle. Alphabetic writing systems use individual letters or groups of letters (graphemes) to represent the sounds in spoken words (phonemes). Understanding the relationship between the grapheme and the phoneme is the foundation on which word reading and spelling skills develop. Once the alphabetic principle is understood, readers and writers can decipher and construct words with reasonable accuracy, providing a basis for comprehension. Given that the alphabetic principle is key to fluent reading and writing, many researchers have examined how children learn to connect graphemes and phonemes and what skills they bring to this task.

Development of Literacy Skills

Much of the early research suggested that reading and spelling skills develop concurrently along a series of stages, with each stage building upon the previous stages (Byrne, 1992; Frith, 1985; Lomax & McGee, 1987; Share & Gut, 1999). In this view, children form connections that link the written word to its pronunciation and meaning, and different connections predominate at different stages of development. Stage theories suggest that early attempts to relate print to sound are characterized by visual cues. The next stage involves phonetic cues, and this in turn gives way to the systematic use of recurring letter patterns. These theories are supported by evidence that children appear to use different strategies as they gain proficiency in reading and writing.

Early stages of development

Research suggests that children initially attempt to relate print and speech through a non-alphabetic process by which they connect visual features of print to words stored in memory (Ehri, 1999; Ehri & Wilce, 1985; Mason, 1980; Masonheimer, Drum, & Ehri, 1984; Share & Gur, 1999). During this first phase, often referred to as logo-graphic or pre-alphabetic, children do not link graphemes to phonemes in a systematic way. Instead, they select a distinctive feature of the printed word, such as the humps on the m of camel, and use it to identify the pronunciation or meaning of the word. In this view, prereaders are context-dependent learners who recognize print in much the same way that they identify pictures. For young children, both pictures and print are unique visual patterns to which a name is attached. During the logographic phase of reading development, every new word is a new visual configuration that requires independent processing in order to form a rudimentary representation. Processing involves the rote memorization of paired-associate learning, and children use this strategy to learn to identify a limited number of words.

At the logographic stage of development, children's ability to "read" printed material is influenced by the context in which the print occurs, as well as the actual physical characteristics of the print. For example, young children are quick to identify the print that follows a large yellow M shaped like golden arches as the word McDonalds. However, they may be unable to identify the same printed letters when they appear in a neutral context. As another example, after learning to associate a colorful group of letters next to a picture of a giraffe to a particular spoken response, children can identify the print as Toys R Us when they see just the colorful letters. Features such as size, shape, color, and location all provide cues to the appropriate response. Although children are not actually reading during the logographic stage, they are learning to link a visual configuration to a particular spoken word and are beginning to understand that print and speech are associated. The logographic approach allows children to learn a limited number of words. However, these early associations are not systematic and do not provide a foundation on which actual decoding skills can develop. As the overlap between the visual features of words increases, reducing the effectiveness of a visual strategy, children must increasingly rely on the individual letters in words in order to read them. According to stage theories, children then begin to shift from the rote memorization of the logographic stage to the systematic decoding of the alphabetic stage of literacy development.