Literacy Development Stages

For most students, literacy development does not happen quickly. It occurs in stages over several years.

Many educators have presented theories about how reading development may progress in children, seeking to describe how and when meaning is derived from text. They generally fall within one of two approaches:

• Text-based approach
• Reader-based approach

The text-based approach theorizes that bottom-up decoding proceeds from a low level of isolated units such as letters and words, through to higher levels of comprehension. Marsh et al. (1981), proposed a four-stage text-based theory in which all readers must pass through the same sequence of stages as they learn to read. In the first stage, children use linguistic guessing strategies that are based on arbitrary characteristics of words, such as their first letter. The second stage builds on the first and is characterized by the ability to discriminate unknown words by matching orthographic similarities and cues, such as the shape, length, and final letter of a word, to those of known words. Readers in the third stage begin to recognize and use rules to decode unfamiliar words. For example, the reader may notice that the ‘at’ in bat, cat, hat, and mat is pronounced the same. In the final stage, rules for decoding become more sophisticated and reliant on the context within the word to be decoded. For example, the ‘a’ in the word cape has a long sound because the word ends in the silent vowel ‘e’, and the ‘a’ in cap is short because it is followed only by a consonant.

The reader-based approach emphasizes top-down mechanisms, in which the context of the message and the reader’s knowledge assist the reader in processing letters and words (Paran, 1997). Meaning from a text is actively constructed using “schemata” that are present in emerging readers (Graves, Juel, & Graves, 2001). Schemata are knowledge structures that are created from inter-relational concepts about objects or events (Anderson, 1980). On the basis of their current schemata, readers are able to represent and use knowledge in a way that allows new information to become integrated (Rumelhart, 1980). Weaver (2002), for example, believed that meaning from texts arises after a transaction occurs between words on the page and the reader’s knowledge structures. When faced with new texts, readers activate appropriate schemata through which meaning may be filtered. Meaning, then, is not a one-to-one transfer from the text to the mind of the reader. Rather, it is a subjective interpretation of the text that is based on the knowledge that readers bring to the reading task (Graves et al., 2001).

Chall’s Stages of Reading Development

While text- and reader-based models are helpful in attempting to demonstrate how readers may develop the skills that are necessary for fluent reading, a comprehensive model integrates these two perspectives, positing that the bottom-up and top-down processes can work in unison to provide meaning to texts (Graves et al., 2001). One of the commonly used comprehensive models is Chall’s Stages of Reading Development, published in 1983 by psychologist Jeanne S. Chall. Chall believed in the importance of direct and systematic instruction in reading, and proposed that the development stages of literacy can be described in six categories, from Stage 0 to Stage 5 based on typical age ranges and grade levels:

1. Stage 0—Preschool (birth to 6 years old)
2. Stage 1—1^st grade and early 2^nd grade (6 to 7 years old)
3. Stage 2—2^nd and 3^rd grade (7 to 9 years old)
4. Stage 3—4^th to 9^th grade (9 to 13 years old)
5. Stage 4—10^th to 12^th grade (13 to 17 years old
6. Stage 5—college and beyond (18+ years old)

Stage 0

This stage involves typical pre-reading activities when young children pretend to read as they turn the pages of a book, mimicking what they have seen others do. They retell stories from books that have been read to them, or from the pictures they see alongside the words. They begin to learn the alphabet and print sample words as they develop phonemic awareness and phonics skills, and by the age of 6, most children understand several thousand words but may not yet be ready to read nearly that many independently.

Stage 1

This stage involves reading and decoding of words as children begin making connections between letters and sounds, and spoken and printed words. They can read simple texts with frequently-used words and follow phonetic rules. Simple graphemes and combinations of letters are associated with sounds that can be blended to decode unfamiliar words (Breech & Pedley, 1994). Rules are memorized that enable the reader to know when sounds are different depending on the combination of letters that make up a word (e.g., the ‘a’ vowel sound in cap versus cape).

Stage 2

Children continue to learn phonetic patterns well into Stage 2. However, the progression between Stage 1 and Stage 2 is marked by a developmental shift in which children begin to use visual whole-word patterns in addition to phonetic cues to access words from their vocabulary (Rayner & Pollatsek,1989). At this stage, readers are still dependent on phonetic decoding, but as it becomes more automatic, experience becomes more important in building fluency. To support this, texts at this stage are intended not as much for gaining knowledge, but rather for acquiring reading experience and practice. Reading materials should be familiar and children should know the content, so they can concentrate on word and sentence structures.

Stage 3

Beginning with Stage 3, the main purpose of reading is to acquire more information with which to develop meaning. After decoding becomes more automatic in Stage 2, reading becomes a tool with which to add to the student’s knowledge base. While still limited in their knowledge, readers at this stage benefit from texts that are less complex and express ideas through a singular point of view. Word meanings are integrated into the reader’s knowledge base and students assimilate knowledge about their world from their own schematic worldview (Piaget, 1952). Some degree of overlap of content is necessary as students integrate new knowledge. According to Klintsch (1994), there is an optimal learning zone for readers at this stage, in which the texts provide a gap in coherence that is neither too small to stimulate the reader, or too large for the reader to be able to fill in the gaps.

Stage 4

Readers are able to build cognitive representations of their world using multiple points of view. While elementary grade readers learn facts about their world from single-perspective texts, readers in Stage 4 encounter a greater breadth of topics presented through multiple perspectives. Readers at this stage become able to interconnect related knowledge from various perspectives with which they can construct new representations. They construct a situation model from which they are able to make inferences that are not explicit in the text. Students are able to use hypothetical and deductive reasoning, and abstract concepts such as “love” or “beauty”.

Stage 5

In the most mature stage of reading development, reading becomes a process of judgment, analysis, and synthesis. Students judge what is important from what they have read, analyze how it fits within their knowledge base or worldview, and synthesize new knowledge based on their conclusions. Highly skilled readers read selectively, making decisions about what they want to read about and can read nonsequentially to suit their own purposes (Klintsch, 1998).

You can further review this model by downloading a copy of the Chall’s Stages of Reading Development table, which describes the characteristics of each stage, what defines mastery at the end of each stage, how this is acquired, and the relationship between print literacy (reading) and oral literacy (speaking and listening) at each stage.

Literacy can be seen as dependent on instruction, with the corollary that quality of instruction is key. This view emphasizes the developmental nature of literacy—the passage of children through successive stages of literacy, in each of which the reading and writing tasks change qualitatively and the role of the instructor has to change accordingly.”
(Jeanne S. Chall, 1996)

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Assignment:

Using the resources provided, complete the assignment as directed. Be sure to include proper citations for the resources you use, including those provided.

1. Choose two of the stages of literacy development from Stages 0-4. Stage 5 does not apply to this assignment.
2. Reflect on the quote provided above about literacy’s dependency on instruction.
3. For each of the stages you select, describe one reading activity or task, and one writing activity or task you could assign that would appropriately address the student’s needs at that stage.
4. In two paragraphs for each activity, explain how the activities you selected promote literacy development at that stage.

Once you have completed the assignment, save a copy in a document in MS Word format (.doc or .docx) and use the tool below to upload a copy of your work.