Praxis Reading Specialist (5302)

Literacy development begins at birth with oral language: vocabulary, sentence structure and the ability to follow and tell stories. Oral language is the base on which later reading comprehension is built, and children who enter school with limited vocabulary or immature syntax are at risk for comprehension difficulty even when they learn to decode on schedule.

Emergent literacy is the period before conventional reading and writing, in which children acquire knowledge about print through read-alouds, conversation, play and early attempts to write. Several strands grow together.

• Concepts of print: print carries the message; books have a front and a back; text runs left to right and top to bottom with a return sweep; spaces mark word boundaries; one spoken word matches one printed word.
• Alphabet knowledge: naming letters, distinguishing their shapes and beginning to connect them with sounds. Letter knowledge at school entry is among the strongest predictors of later reading.
• Phonological awareness: noticing rhyme, syllables and beginning sounds in spoken words.
• Early writing: scribbles, letter-like forms and letter strings that show a growing sense that marks stand for language.

Phonological awareness develops from larger to smaller units of sound: words in sentences, then syllables, then onsets and rimes, and finally individual phonemes. Phonemic awareness, the ability to isolate, blend, segment and manipulate phonemes, is the most advanced level and the one most closely tied to reading and spelling. For many children it does not emerge without teaching; it develops through instruction and through learning how letters map onto sounds.

The alphabetic principle is the insight that letters and letter combinations represent the phonemes of spoken words in a systematic way. Once children hold this insight and know a set of letter–sound correspondences, they can decode: convert the letters of an unfamiliar word into sounds and blend them. Early decoding is slow and effortful, and with successful practice it becomes rapid.

Ehri described word-reading development as a sequence of phases, each defined by the kind of connection a reader forms between a printed word and its pronunciation. The phases overlap, and a student's errors show which phase is dominant.

Orthographic mapping is the mental process that turns a decoded word into a sight word. The reader bonds the word's phonemes to its graphemes, along with its meaning, so that the spelling is stored in memory and the word is later recognized instantly. Mapping depends on phonemic awareness and letter–sound knowledge, which is why students who try to memorize words as visual wholes retain few of them. Typical readers store a word after a few successful encounters; students with word-reading difficulty need many more.

Spelling (encoding) develops in parallel with word reading and draws on the same knowledge, so a student's spellings are a window into what the student understands about print. Developmental spelling research describes five stages. Errors are examined for the features a student uses but confuses, which mark the point at which instruction should begin.

Fluency emerges as decoding becomes accurate and then automatic. Beginning readers read word by word; as more words are mapped into memory, rate increases and attention is released for phrasing and expression (prosody). Fluency therefore develops in the order accuracy, automaticity, prosody. It is also relative to text difficulty: a student may be fluent in simple text and disfluent in complex text.

Vocabulary grows first through conversation and read-alouds and later, once students read independently, mainly through wide reading. Receptive vocabulary (words understood) is larger than expressive vocabulary (words used). Growth occurs in breadth (the number of words known) and in depth (how well each word is known).

Comprehension develops first as listening comprehension. In the primary grades children understand far more complex language by ear than they can read, so listening comprehension sets the upper limit for reading comprehension, and the two converge as word reading becomes automatic. From the upper elementary grades onward, vocabulary, background knowledge and command of complex syntax account for most of the differences among readers.

Written expression moves from drawing and scribbling, to invented spelling that represents the prominent sounds in words, to transitional writing with many conventional spellings, and then to conventional writing in which transcription is fluent and attention shifts to ideas, organization and style. Reading and writing are reciprocal. Segmenting a word to spell it strengthens decoding, and reading supplies the vocabulary, sentence patterns and text structures that writers reuse.

Chall's stage model places these strands on a broad timeline from birth to adulthood. Grade ranges are approximate, and the model is used to judge whether instructional goals fit a reader's stage.

The shift between Stages 2 and 3 is often summarized as moving from learning to read to reading to learn. Students whose decoding is not automatic by this point, or whose vocabulary and knowledge are limited, tend to fall behind as texts become more demanding.