What are early reading skills and how are they developed?
Reading is one of the most fundamental skills students can learn. It affects all academic achievement and is associated with social, emotional, economical, and physical health. However, learning to read does not happen naturally. The ability to read is not innate. Reading is a process involving specific skills that need to be taught and learned. As these skills develop, the brain forms new connections known as neural pathways. These neural pathways for reading are built through systematic and explicit instruction and strengthened through repeated practice.
Students develop oral language proficiency by listening and speaking (including through experiences with other languages), which lays a solid foundation for reading. Strong reading comprehension occurs when students derive meaning from oral language and combine it with fluency in reading words and texts. Oral language continues to impact reading proficiency as students progress through school and build a growing vocabulary. The process of reading acquisition is different for students whose first or primary language is American Sign Language (ASL) or langue des signes québécoise (LSQ). For these students, ASL/LSQ and English/French bilingual teaching methods are used for the development of biliteracy between ASL or LSQ and English or French as a second or additional language.
Knowing how language is structured is key to developing early reading skills. Students learn that words on the printed page represent language, that each word has meaning, and that words can be broken down into syllables, which are made of letters and letter combinations (graphemes) and represent sounds (phonemes).
The development of phonological skills includes being able to identify the number of words in a spoken sentence. Phonemic awareness involves identifying and manipulating the smallest sound units in language (phonemes), such as identifying where the /c/ sound is in “cat.” Alphabet knowledge, which refers to knowing the relationship between letters and the sounds they make (more precisely referred to as grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence), develops alongside phonological skills and phonemic awareness. Combined, these skills lead to proficiency in decoding words, learning to read words accurately and quickly, and language comprehension, eventually building strong reading comprehension and spelling skills. Strong reading comprehension is only achieved through language comprehension and decoding, not one or the other in isolation.
When students make connections between the spelling and the pronunciation of words, they are engaged in a cognitive process known as “orthographic mapping.” It requires an awareness of the graphemes (letters or letter clusters) in a printed word and their corresponding phonemes, and then applying these concepts to sound out or read words. As students decode words, the brain is linking the phoneme sequence in a known spoken word with the sequence of letters in the corresponding written word. After decoding a word and word parts sufficiently and often, the internal representation of the precise sequence of letters is stored in long-term memory and linked with the word’s pronunciation and meaning. At this point, students can recognize the word automatically as a “sight word”, without using a decoding strategy. Sight words are not stored as images, they are mapped orthographically. With repeated practice, young students build up an ever-growing bank of sight words and sight letter combinations. This automatic recognition of words leads to more fluent and proficient reading.
