You must have realized that human skills are always improved from when we were children to our age or maybe, or even the adults, right?
The same goes for our linguistic skills, which also improved from time to time. One of them is our ability to read. So, the progress of our ability to read from time to time itself is the meaning of reading development.
There are a few stages of reading development, let’s move ahead to know more about each step of the progress.
Stage 1 : The Emergent Readers
The first stage that can be considered as the most essential step of our reading development, is called by the emergent readers or also known as pre-reader. It usually happens between 6 months to 6 years old of our age.
At this stage, we show our interest to read. Sometimes, we also take and pick books that are fascinating to us. That’s why, as a child, we need to get the exposure to literature that can entertain us and have a certain quality. For the parents themselves, their role is needed to encourage our interest and develop us so we love to read.
Signs of this Stage
- Understand that pictures have meaning
- Likes to read and touch the handling books
- Having an opinion about an illustration
- Starting to familiar with sounds and the name of an object
- Be able to recognize letters and how it sounds
Recommendations for what the parents should try
- Having a conversation with the baby, but not using the ‘baby talk’.
- Tells or read a story and ask out a simple question of the story.
- Giving an example of the child’s experience that related to the story.
Stage 2 : The Early Readers
Early readers or also known as the novice reader is happening when we are 6 to 7 years old. At this stage, we will get to understand more about what a sentence means, we will found out the relation between the words, how to read a paragraph and how it sounds. We will also get used to spelling the words with high frequency and variety of how the phonetic sounds and some of the new spelling of syllables.
Signs of this Stage
- Begin to memorize the story that the’ve read.
- Learn and remembering common and new words.
- Familiar to read a story and understand the meaning of the story.
- Using their knowledge to read an unfamiliar text.
- Start to predict the meaning of the words based on their illustration or the sentence of the story.
Recommendations for what the parents should try
- Exemplify how to make a question out of the text.
- Explain and show how to predict the meaning of a word, the context of the sentence, etc.
- Show new vocabularies.
- Introduce how to read a paragraph correctly.
Stage 3 : The Transitional Readers
The transitional readers or also known as exploration readers happens when we’re about 9-15 y.o. This is the step when children can read more fluently, they will start to learn the difficult text. However, for the complicated and difficult text itself, they may still need some help with it. They will also find a lot more vocabulary, knowledge, and gain more viewpoint to explore the issues from multiple perspectives.
Signs of this stage
- Figure how to read more fluently, and how the punctuation is used in the sentence.
- Understanding the unknown words with their knowledge of phonemes and digraph.
- Improve their reading comprehensions.
- Gain the ability to understand an expression and predict it’s context.
Stage 4 : The Independent Readers
The children will start to learn how to read independently and consistently. They would even read the longer and more complicated text. They can also choose the books that are relevant to what they search, or figuring out the point of a book.
Signs of this stage
- More confident and independent as they read.
- Understanding the context of a paragraph by various point of view
- Figure out and be aware of what they reads, because the writer’s opinion could influence their point of thinking.
- Have more purpose to read, and even expanding their genre or their interests.