As adults, we take reading for granted, forgetting the letters we had trouble learning, how long we wrote them backwards and how many times we misread words. We’re completely unaware of the complex and marvellous development process we went through as young children as we learned how to read. 

“Worldwide, the number of people who can’t read a single word is around 1 billion people.”

Even in countries with successful and acclaimed education systems, a significant proportion of the population do not know how to read proficiently or at a level that allows them to participate in a modern economy. By this definition, the number of adults in the world who are not proficient readers jumps to almost half of the world’s total population. 

Teaching children to read is the number one responsibility of any school, and most schools devote at least three years to this topic. The numbers above suggest that something is not working in literacy instruction. How can this problem be fixed? One place to begin is asking what proficient readers ‘know’ that supports their ability to read.

Learning to read is hard

Because reading is an enormously complex task involving many neurological processes, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists have been studying it for decades. In the last 40 years, scientists have made remarkable progress in understanding how children learn to read. Learning to read proficiently depends on the brain fully integrating what a person knows about spoken language with what they learn about written language. In fact, Mark Seidenberg describes the full integration of verbal and written language in the brain as the hallmark of a proficient reader. What are those skills and how do they relate to each other?

In 2000, the National Reading Panel (United States), conducted a literature review that identified the skillsets found to influence reading development. Further research has confirmed that when children develop knowledge in these areas, they are more likely to be proficient readers. Those skills are:

• Phonemic awareness — the understanding of the sounds in spoken language and that words can be broken into smaller sounds

• Phonics or orthography — the knowledge of how the symbols of a written language relate to the sounds of a spoken language

• Fluency — the ability to automatically identify words with great speed and accuracy

• Vocabulary — understanding the meanings of words in spoken and written language

• Comprehension — deriving meaning from text

Simply, a child begins by being able to speak a language but being unable to read it, then learns the system of symbols used to represent the language and accurately deciphers words on a page, to finally being able to read fluently and comprehend virtually any text. You can characterise these stages in roughly the following way: 1) pre-readers; 2) early readers; 4) emerging readers; 5) the fluent reader; 6) the expert reader. 

Pre-readers know the language’s vocabulary, can build complex sentences to communicate and understand the language in their environment, but cannot read.  What a pre-reader knows about spoken language prepares them for what they learn about written language. That’s why children with more advanced language skills are more likely to read well (for example, they know more complex words). It may sometimes look like a very young child can read because they memorised their favourite book or recognise their name. However, if you give them a different book, they lack the knowledge to figure out the words.

The next step — learning to listen for individual sounds

Less obvious than what children know about words and sentences is what they know about language sounds. In English, children with advanced ‘phoneme awareness’ skills recognise rhyming words or the same sounds repeated at the beginnings of words, like alliteration. This awareness of sound patterns in language prepares children to pick out the individual sounds in words. Until this point, children could only hear one big sound — /cat/ — for the word that describes the furry, four-legged creature that meows. Children with advanced phoneme awareness skills can hear that /cat/ is made up of three separate sounds /c/-/a/-/t/. 

When they can hear those individual sounds, they are ready to start learning how the individual sounds are represented by symbols and the ‘phonics’ rules that govern how a language is written. The chief occupation of the early reader stage is to figure out and remember each and every symbol and its relationship to the sounds of the language. In some languages, like Finnish or Swahili, the rules are consistent and usually acquired quickly. When an early reader sees a word, he or she has to remember those relationships for every letter or group of letters and understand how they blend together to make a word. Children at this stage can read very predictable words and words that occur very frequently, but cannot read very quickly. 

 

English is hard

Emerging readers can typically decode the words on the page but are still learning how to read longer words or words that appear less frequently.  Learning to read in English takes longer to progress from an early reader to an emerging reader as there is simply more to learn. In English, the rules of reading or spelling are governed by more than just sounds, but also the word’s history or how it is connected to other words. For example, the “c” in “muscle” is still present even if you don’t hear it because the spelling exhibits the connections between words like “muscular” and “musculature”.  

At this stage of reading development, some children will fluently read stories that they are familiar with but might still struggle with unfamiliar words or text. That's ok; they're still learning. Identifying a word with little or no effort means that children have achieved the next stage of learning to read, which is becoming fluent. Both the emerging reader and the fluent reader require lots of reading practice to consolidate all letters, letter patterns, and words in the written language they are learning.

“When you can read fluently, you see each word and instantly — within 250 milliseconds — know what it means”

How fluency leads to proficient readers

Children who read fluently can easily identify 95% of the words in a text and can read them quickly, even instantaneously.  Fluent readers do not need to think about how to sound out a word; they just know the word. Because their mental resources are not taken up by thinking about the words and letters, the reader can focus on what the text means. They can consider the new information in the text and add new words to their vocabulary, which is necessary for academic success. Reading fluently is not about reading quickly but it is a sign that the reader is able to pull together all the information they need to read words automatically.

The importance of fluency is often underestimated. Research suggests that many children in high-income countries who do not succeed academically, fail because they never reach this stage of literacy development. They can technically read, but it requires effort, and they often have to concentrate so intently on identifying the words that they no longer understand the text. 

Once children enter secondary school, almost all learning is achieved by reading text and learning the essential words for history, math, chemistry, physics, etc. So not being able to read fluently is not a minor issue, but necessary for this learning to occur.

Altogether, research has shown that being a proficient reader involves having highly accurate, quickly accessible and interconnected language, visual and textual knowledge. All of these skills develop dynamically and strongly influence each other. For example, when children have large and detailed vocabularies, they typically also have very good phonological and phoneme awareness. These skills prepare them for learning phonics conventions, which increases their ability to distinguish the phonemes from each other. 

“When children attain high reading accuracy levels, they typically feel confidence in their reading, which makes them more likely to read more. The more they read, the more likely they are to gain fluency in their reading, which typically increases their vocabulary knowledge. When all these processes come together in a highly coordinated dance in the reading brain, the reader has become an expert reader.”

This is by no means the end of the story. What’s so great about reading is that it never stops growing and developing. At Curious Learning, we are working to build a collection of content that will help children learn what they need at the beginning of the reading process as well as have lots of interactive books to read so they can continue learning. 

Written by Stephanie Gottwald, Director of Content, Specialist and Researcher in Edtech and literacy.  Her role at Curious Learning is to lead the effort to find and build the best apps for learning to read in a variety of languages and cultural settings. 

Curious Learning can help children learn to read 

Do you need assistance in helping your child to learn to read? Or do you want to see young children from around the world discover the joy and freedom of reading? We have developed a range of FREE educational apps, available in over 40 languages, designed to empower children in fun, self-guided learning through exploration and curiosity. View and download our apps here: https://www.curiouslearning.org/apps