Reading Development

There are five stages of reading development. They are the emerging pre-reader, novice reader, decoding reader, fluent comprehending reader, and the expert reader. It is normal that children will move through these different stages at different rates.

Emerging pre-reader

The emerging pre-reader stage, also known as reading readiness, happens when a young child sits and listens to someone read to them. Emerging reading takes many years of language experience, along with the increase of both conceptual and social development.^[9] Showing that this process starts early in a child's life is the fact that children typically produce their first few words before their first birthday.^[1] This emerging pre-reader stage usually lasts for the first five years of a child's life.^[9]

During the emerging pre-reader stage children will often "read" books and stories. They will tell the story as they have memorized it and turn the pages appropriately. They call what they are doing "reading" since they typically don't yet understand that their parents or caregivers are decoding written words. To them, they are doing what they think their parents or caregivers are doing when reciting the story.

One group of researchers in the United States found in the late 1990s and 2000s that the traditional way of reading to children made little difference in their later ability to read, and hypothesized this was because children spend relatively little time actually looking at the text. They found that simple exercises during reading which directed children to pay attention to and think about letters and words made a significant difference in early reading progress.^[10]

Novice reader

Reading time at a primary school in rural Laos. Learning to read poses different challenges in Laos compared to English-speaking countries. The written language follows clear phonetic rules, so the mechanics of reading are easier than with English. However, children learn from a teacher with a blackboard, and get little or no opportunity to improve their reading skills by reading for pleasure. Most schools have no library and no books except textbooks; even fourth-grade students often cannot read a full sentence. The daily reading period shown here uses books provided by Big Brother Mouse, which promotes reading in Lao schools and villages.

The next step in the learning to read process is the novice reading stage^[9] also known as selective association.^[1] This begins with the child learning to decode print and understanding the meaning of what has been decoded.^[9] To do this, the child must first figure out the Alphabetic principle and master it in only a few years.^[9] Most children know that the words on a page in a book mean something, but do not readily understand how the letters code the meaning. They know that these words are made of the sounds of their particular language, and that letters convey these sounds. Novice readers learn to hear and manipulate the smaller sounds into syllables and words.^[9] If a child is able to master this skill, called phonological awareness, it is one of the best predictors of a child's success in learning to read.^[9] One way that you can teach children to become more aware of sounds within words is through such things as nursery rhymes that enhance the child's ability to hear and divide the structure of words. Another way to teach a child to read is through little "games" in which the sounds in word are either clapped, written or danced to a beat.^[9] A novice reader will also memorize the most common letter patterns in their own language and most of the frequent words that will not necessarily follow the phonological rules such as in English the words "have" and "who".^[9] It is in this stage that children will develop a vocabulary of words that is between 2,500 to 5,000 words.^[1] Children's vocabularies continue to grow as they enter elementary school, since they will continue to learn new words at a rate of about seven words per day.^[1] This shows that at this stage in reading the best piece of advice is to just practice, practice, practice or read, read more, and read again.

Decoding reader

The transition from the novice reader stage to the decoding stage is marked by the absence of painful pronunciations and in its place the sounds of a smoother, more confident reader.^[9] In this phase of learning to read, the reader adds at least 3,000 words to what they can decode. For example, in the English language, that readers need to now learn the variations of the vowel-based rhymes and vowel pairs It is essential during this stage, if a reader is going to become fluent, the reader needs to acquire a sufficient repertoire of the letter-patterns and vowel-pairs that help to make up words that go beyond the basic level.The faster a child can see that the word "together" is "to-ge-ther", the faster the reader will become a more fluent reader.^[9] As children move forward with their reading skills, they learn a great deal about what is really inside a word; the stem, roots, prefixes andsuffixes that make up morphemes of the language.^[9] By this stage, children already know about the common bound morphemes such as "s" and "ed" because these are attached to many words. Decoding readers become exposed to many types of morphemes such as prefixes and suffixes, and it is when they learn to read these as "sight chunks" that their reading and their understanding will speed up dramatically. Being able to read at a fluent level is not only about how fast a child can read, but it is matter of being able to utilize all the special knowledge that they have about a word—its letters, letter patterns, meanings, grammatical functions, roots, and endings—fast enough that they have time to think and comprehend what they are seeing. The point of becoming a proficient reader is to fluently read and comprehend what had just been read. Decoding readers are just beginning to understand and learn how to use their expanding knowledge of language and their growing powers of inference to figure out what they are really reading.^[9]

In the beginning of the decoding stage a child will often be devoting so much mental capacity to the process of decoding that they will have no comprehension of the meaning of the words being read. This is most likely if the text being read is at or above their skill level. It is nevertheless an important stage. Such decoding practice allows the child to improve their decoding skills with the ultimate goal of becoming automatic as it is for most skilled readers with most text they encounter. Like every skill, the more you do it the better you get. Though comprehension may be poor at this stage, it is nevertheless an important step towards comprehension. As the skill of decoding improves and the more automatic it becomes the more the child has mental capacity to devote to comprehension. Therefore, understanding of what is being read increases.

It is also in the decoding phase that the child will learn to go beyond what is said in writing in the story to get the underlying meaning of what the story is really about. In the decoding stage a child also learns that if a sentence or paragraph is not understood, re-reading it a second or third time may be necessary in order to fully understand the passage. Knowing when a text needs to be re-read is a very important skill and can improve comprehension greatly.^[9]

Fluent, comprehending reader

The next stage in reading development is the fluent, comprehending reader stage, in which children shift from learning to read, to reading to learn. In this stage the reader builds up a substantial background of knowledge of spelling.^[9] It is during this time in a reader's development that teachers and parents can be tricked by fluent-sounding reading into thinking that a childunderstands everything that he or she is reading. As the content of what they are able to read becomes more demanding, good readers will develop knowledge of figurative language andirony which helps them to discover new meanings in the text. This will assist them to understand the meaning of what they are reading beyond what is written on the page. While learning to read, one of the most powerful moments is when fluent comprehending readers learn to enter into the lives of imagined heroes and heroines.^[9] Examples of books where these imagined heroes and heroines could be found in include Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Huckleberry Finn. The comprehension process grows while reading books like these, where children learn how to connect prior knowledge, predict good or bad consequences, draw inferences from every danger-filled corner, monitor gaps in their understanding, and interpret how each new clue, revelation, or added piece of knowledge changes what they know. In learning these new skills, they learn to unpeel the layers of meaning in a word, a phrase or a thought.^[9]

There are two ways in which increasing fluency can be supported. They include explicit instruction in comprehension by a child's teacher and the child's own desire to read. Engaging in conversation about what they are reading allows the beginning reader to ask critical questions, facilitating a better understanding of the central meaning.^[9]

At the end of this stage, before the reader becomes an expert reader, many processes are starting to become automatic. This increasing automaticity frees up cognitive resources so that the reader can reflect on meaning. With the decoding process almost automatic by this point, the brain learns to integrate more metaphorical, inferential, analogical, background and experiential knowledge with every newly won millisecond. This stage in learning to read often will last until early adulthood.^[11]

Expert reader

The final stage in learning to read, is the expert stage. When a reader is at this stage of reading, it will usually only take them one half second to read almost any word.^[12] The degree to which expert reading will change over the course of an adult's life depends on what a person reads and how much they read.^[13] As a person matures, life experiences as well as the cognitive process of reading text shapes reading comprehension. It is this interpretive response that adds depth to reading and will often take the reader in a new direction from where the authorintended.^[13]

sumber : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_to_read