What stages are there in the reading lessons

Reading Skills

Reading is one of the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Listening and reading are receptive skills and they are aimed at perceiving, comprehending, and processing information in oral or written form. We have to relate words and notions behind those words, to understand how the words are connected in a sentence, and how the sentences are linked into one whole text. Finally, to make sense of the text we have to relate the information in it to our knowledge of the world.

In contrast, speaking and writing are productive skills. They are directed at generating a message. In order to generate a message we recall the words that express the notions in our mind, connect them syntactically into a sentence, link the sentences so that they make up one whole and relate the message to the listener’s knowledge of the world.

In light of the communicative approach to language teaching, reading means comprehending a written text by extracting the required information from it as efficiently as possible. For example, while looking through job ads in a newspaper we mean to locate the jobs of a particular type. A competent reader will quickly reject the irrelevant information and find what she is looking for. On the contrary, more detailed comprehension is necessary when carefully reading an article of special interest in a scientific journal.

Reading aloud, i.e. ability to perceive and decode letters in order to read words, is not a skill by itself. Rather, it is a technique to develop and test the correctness of a learner’s pronunciation, rhythm and intonation. Reading aloud is widely practised at early stages of language learning, especially by following a model. Later on, when larger pieces of texts come along silent reading prevails.

In general, there are two main reasons for reading:

1) Reading for pleasure
2) Reading for information

The communicative approach to language teaching defines the following reading subskills:

If we read to identify the topic of a text, to get a general idea of what it is about, we read for gist. This is called skimming. When skimming, we go through the reading material quickly in order to get the gist of it, to know how it is organized, or to get an idea of the tone or the intention of the writer.

If we read a text just to find a specific piece or pieces of information which may or may not be the main points and which are pre-specified by the purpose of the reading, we read for specific information. This is called scanning. We only try to locate specific information and often we do not even follow the linearity of the passage to do so. We simply let our eyes wander over the text until we find what we are looking for, whether it be a name, a date, or a less specific piece of information.

Reading Strategies

Skimming and scanning are major reading subskills necessary for quick and efficient reading. In addition to these major reading subskills a number of minor reading strategies are often specified for focusing on in teaching reading.

1) using context to guess meaning of new words
2) skipping unknown words
3) relying on cognates, international and borrowed words to guess meaning
4) avoiding translating while skimming or scanning
5) avoiding translating every unknown word to understand
6) highlighting key ideas
7) highlighting specific information for easy reference
8) previewing the text to estimate how long it will take to read, how difficult and interesting it will
be and then go back and read
9) using subheadings and pictures to get a general idea of what the text will be about
10) using a dictionary to look up those new words which are essential to comprehending
11) looking back and ahead to link parts of the text
12) searching for clues in the context
13) using general knowledge to guess meaning
14) thinking aloud to clarify a puzzling sentence.

This list may well be continued. Most of the listed reading strategies are on the subconscious level and come from general reading ability in one’s native language. The teacher’s task is to enable learners to transfer these strategies to reading in English or to develop them while teaching younger learners.

In reading for pleasure any of the above ways of reading may be used depending on what the reader wants from her reading.

Another way of looking at ways of reading is to consider to what extent the text gets exploited for learning purposes. We can differentiate between extensive and intensive reading.

Extensive reading means reading longer texts, usually for your own pleasure. This is a fluency activity, mainly involving global understanding. It aims at developing speed of reading and guessing strategies.

Intensive reading means reading shorter texts in order to extract specific information and to examine language, i.e. to work out the grammar of a particular sentence, to look for all the words related to a topic, etc. This is more an accuracy activity, aimed at accurate understanding of the text. The aim of these activities is to make learners more aware of how language is used.

These different ways of reading are not mutually exclusive. For example, we often skim through a passage to see what it is about before deciding whether it is worth scanning a particular paragraph for the information we are looking for.

Language textbooks are compiled mainly of texts meant for intensive reading. These texts are processed in the lesson
— at word level: to introduce and practice vocabulary and become aware of lexical links within the text
— at sentence level: to analyse the grammar of each sentence and grammatical links between sentences
— at whole text level: to analyse text structure and type.

As a rule the final stage of intensive text processing deals with relating the information in it to learners’ life experience and knowledge of the world and interpreting this information.

Text Selection

Texts for reading should be carefully selected. They should be interesting, relevant to learner’s age, entertaining and motivating in the first place and they should certainly be at the right level of difficulty. A text may be too difficult because it contains complex language and /or because it is about a topic that learners don’t know about.

Textbook materials are sometimes teacher-written, i.e. they contain texts which are specially written or simplified for language learners. At other times they may read articles, brochures, story books, etc. that are what a first language speaker would read. This is called authentic material. Such materials are more varied and richer in language, and consequently they might be too difficult for language learners. Instead of being simplified such materials may get easified and thus preserve the authenticity of the original text, making the reading more realistic. Text easification techniques include:

1) number the lines
2) separate the paragraphs
3) add sub-headings
4) highlight words, sentences, paragraphs
5) add visuals
6) use colours to aid memory
7) change the font size, enlarge the text, etc.
8) add comments or questions
9) add somebody else’s text to it
10) translate difficult words
11) provide pronunciation of unfamiliar words using the IPA offers a range of different techniques of helping second-language readers cope with the vocabulary load by defining, illustrating and simply providing clearer context for reading.

Text, Cohesion and Coherence

Text is the verbal record of a communicative event. Whether a set of words and sentences constitute a text or not, depends on cohesive relationships within and between the sentences. These cohesive relationships form the principles of connectivity which bind a text together and force co-interpretation. In other words, in a text the interpretation of some element is dependent on that of another. You are unable to decode some element without finding what it refers to within the same text. For example in the following sentence- ‘I’ve spoken to Kim today. She sounded very happy.’ She in the second sentence refers back to Kim in the first sentence. The referent for she can be found by looking back into the text. Thus she is given the identity of Kim.

Grammatical cohesion devices can be classified under the following types:

1) reference (see the previous example)
2) ellipsis (the omission of an element normally required by the grammar), e.g., Tommy can’t swim at all, but I can ([I can] swim is supplied from the first clause to the second).
3) substitution, e.g. I’d like a kilo of apples. Which ones? These ones?
4) conjunctive relations, e.g. and, but, in addition, so, then, after that, etc.

Text cohesion may be also derived from lexical relationships like hyponymy (cat is a hyponym of pet), part-whole (nose is part of a face), synonymy (start and begin), by consistency of tense, and by stylistic choice e.g. The gentleman encountered an acquaintance. vs. The guy met up with this bloke he knows.

However, sometimes a text may lack any explicit markers of cohesive relations. Two of the much-quoted examples are the following one:

A: There’s the doorbell.

B: I’m in the bath.

Yet, by using our knowledge of the world we are able to reconstruct the context where such a dialogue might be possible and imply what it is all about. The first utterance must be a request to see who is at the door; the reply to it is an excuse not to fulfil this request: the person is in the bath. Here we are looking at the pragmatic meaning of the utterances that comes from the context rather than from syntax or lexis. Pragmatics is the study of what speakers mean to convey when they use a particular structure in context.

When we talk about text coherence we refer to such terms as ‘background knowledge’ or ‘knowledge of the world’ which are beyond the scope of linguistics. This background knowledge includes the knowledge of the structure of stereotypic event sequences such as grocery shopping or booking a plane ticket, i.e. script knowledge. And we do bear in mind the principles of rhetorical organization and social constrains on communication; for example, a greeting sequence, such as,

Stages of a reading lesson

While devising exercises aimed at developing reading comprehension, we should keep in mind that there are several types of reading and they depend on one’s reasons for reading. Learners will never read efficiently unless they can adapt their reading speed and techniques to their aim when reading. By reading all texts in the same way, learners would waste time and fail to remember points of importance to them because they would absorb too much non-essential information.

As a rule there are three main stages in a reading lesson:

Pre-reading activities: an introduction to the topic. These activities draw in the learner’s current knowledge or attitude to the subject, and create the state of anticipation preparing the learner for a ‘dialogue’ with the text. Through an introduction activity the learner forms a number of questions which she expects to find answers to in the text, and while reading she is looking for those answers. This expectation is inherent in the process of reading which is a permanent interrelationship between the reader and the text. Pre-reading activities, for example, may include the following tasks:

1) predicting from the title the content of the text
2) guessing the content from the list of key words
3) Discussing illustrations to the text
4) answering questions about the topic and thus eliciting background information

While-reading activities: a series of comprehension activities aimed at creating meaning of the text. Sometimes the same text is read a few times, each time with a different task. These activities focus on understanding cohesive grammatical and lexical relations within sentences and between parts of the text. This stage can be also used to focus on new structures and vocabulary of the lesson when a reading passage is a means of introducing new language. Or it may include awareness-raising activities. They all aid comprehension. For example,

1) questions of different kinds: open or multiple-choice questions
2) true/false statements
3) Choosing the best title
4) decision-making activities: drawing a diagram with the information given in the text
5) completing a table or a document, solving a problem
6) matching exercises: headings and paragraphs, questions and answers
7) comparing several texts in their content or points of view
8) activities aimed at developing study skills, such as using a dictionary
9) leaving out unessential information by highlighting key ideas and words
10) note-taking and summarizing
11) guessing the meaning of unknown words
12) making inferences and reading between lines
13) jig-saw reading
14) ordering a sequence of pictures

Post-reading activities: learners are asked to relate the information in the text to their own lives (personalisation) or exchange their opinions on issues in the text. The ability to evaluate and assess the text in order to develop critical reading skills is the aim here.

Stages of Reading Development: The Ultimate Guide

Best Kids Story Books in English to Read to Your Children

Reading and Writing

7 Amazing Benefits of Nursery Rhymes

Reading and Writing

Authentic Spanish Children’s Books Your Family Will Love

Stages of Reading Development: The Ultimate Guide

In this post you can find everything you need to know about the 6 stages of reading development. We dive into each reading stage in detail giving examples and tips on how to help with each developmental stage of reading.

Literacy is an important part of childhood development and the benefits of reading with and to your child are endless.

Children do not become readers overnight though. There are different stages of reading development that children go through in order to become proficient readers.

Although not all children progress through these reading stages at the same time, most children will follow a general pattern of progression.

In this post we will go through the 6 stages of reading development most children will go through when learning to read.

Importance of Reading

It’s a question that has come up time and time again – Isn’t it just a waste of time reading to a baby? I can see why many people think that, I mean, how much is that four month old on your lap actually taking in?

Turns out, a lot more than you actually realise. Reading is a form of stimulation for them and is beneficial to their language development.

While they may not understand the words, they are learning how to communicate, watching the colours and the patterns on the page, and most importantly, setting them up with good habits for years to come.

Did you know that by the age of 12 months, a baby will have learned all the sounds they need to speak their native language? How amazing is that!

What are the Stages of Reading Development?

There are a number of different reading stages that a child will go through when it comes to developing your child’s literacy skills. It is important to devote enough time and attention to get them through each one.

Consider them building blocks that will help build their knowledge each step of the way.

But what exactly are these stages or reading development and what should we expect?

Here we dive into each reading stage in more detail

1. Emergent readers

This stage of reading development is usually associated with children birth to six years old, before they enter kindergarten.

This is the beginning of a long journey into reading, and it’s important to realise each stage needs to be nurtured accordingly.

Remember, always be positive when it comes to reading. A positive attitude can make a big difference to how the child sees and treats books.

As mentioned above, it is important to read to your child from birth, as this lays the foundations for their future reading habits and skills. (Find some popular story books here.)

As they get older, you will start to notice a few skills coming out when you read to them.

What to expect from an emergent reader:

How to help your emergent reader develop their skills:

2. Early readers

This stage of reading development often occurs in the early years of school when children are about 6 to 7 years old.

Are you sending your child to school and they don’t know how to read? This is nothing to stress about. Each child develops at their own time, and plus, what is school for?

School is where they will learn. Let your child’s class teachers guide you through this stage of reading, and always remember how important support at home is.

What to expect from early readers:

How to help early readers:

3. Progressive readers

This stage of reading development is a natural progression of the early readers and can occur anytime between 6 and 7 years old.

You will find the more you sit down and read with your child, the more quickly they make the transition.

What to expect from a progressive reader:

How to help a progressive reader:

4. Transitional readers

This is the final stage of reading development where a child is still likely going to need you sitting beside them while they read.

Transitional readers generally cover the age groups 7 to 8 years old.

What you will notice with a transitional reader:

How to help a transitional reader:

5. Fluent/Independent readers

What to expect from fluent/independent readers:

How to help a fluent/independent readers

6. Advanced readers

We have made it to the final stage of reading development that generally begins around the age of 14 years old and is in constant development from that point forward.

What to expect from advanced readers:

How to help advanced readers

The Stages of Reading Development start at Birth

As you can see, the stages of reading development start from the moment your little one is born and continues from there. It is something that takes time and effort, but offers so many benefits to your child.

Author: Felicity is mum of 2 daughters. Her passion is the parenting industry and creating a community where everyone feels welcome no matter how they choose to parent. Follow Flick at The Baby Vine, on Facebook and Instagram.

Bilingual Kidspot

Bilingual Kidspot is a website offering practical advice for parents seeking to raise bilingual or multilingual children; with inspiration, support and strategies based on experience as a parent, and as a teacher of a foreign language to children.

Stages of a Reading Lesson

Practicing reading skills is one of the cornerstones of language learning. They not only improve the overall language competence but also enhance the learners’ critical thinking, analytical skills and as a source of information.

In order to have a productive reading session the teacher must conduct the lesson following these stages:

This article aims at giving some practical guidance to teachers who are eager to have productive reading sessions.

Pre-reading activities

One of the most important stages of any reading activity is the appropriate setting of the context, familiarization with the active vocabulary, getting to know how much the learners know about the topic. For this purpose, the following activities may be used,

While-reading activities

They help students to focus on aspects of the text and to understand it better. The goal of these activities is to help learners to deal with the text as if it was written in their mother tongue.

Post-reading activities

These activities mainly aim at integrating the target material into the real-life and personalized practice in order to keep the authentic use of the language, make the learners feel that whatever they learn they turn into real-life experience in terms of language use.

Considering the utmost importance of reading skill in language learning, all the above-mentioned activities can serve as nice tools to hone the learners’ reading skills.

You can look at some more interesting ideas and useful resources here.

Teaching Reading Activities According to CELTA

CELTA, like mentioned earlier in this article, is one of the most demanded initial teaching qualifications, that is widely recognized throughout the world and has a lot of teachers applying for it yearly. It shouldn’t surprise us then, that this a quite intensive course, rich in theoretical knowledge and practical experience.

It tends to be that passive skills are actually getting less attention in the classroom than they should, hence, here we will be talking about some reading activities that I have learnt to use during the CELTA course I was doing a couple of years ago.

Stage 1 — Warm up

First of all, we should bear in mind, that no matter what skill we are working with (speaking, writing, listening or reading) warming the students up for the upcoming session is the first step to take. This ensures that the learners are prepared in the frame of the topic and will be ready to dive into it at later stages of the lesson. Here are a couple of ideas that we can use to create a context for, let’s say, a reading section about “Travelling”.

Option 1

Draw a spider’s gram and ask the students to brainstorm on what associations they have with the word “travelling”. Elicit at least 8 ideas. Below is a sample of a spider’s gram my students had come up with.

Next you can ask the students to narrow down their associations and come up with 1 word that would summarize the idea of “travelling”.

In my case the students had equaled “travelling” with “Brazil”. This game creates a good round of laughter and is really fun in the process. The students feel relaxed, ready for the text.

You can start with the same association game, but do just the first part. Next you can have 3 questions about travelling you want the students to comment on in pairs. For instance:

This will also get the students warmed up for the topic and will let them have speaking practice right in the beginning of the class.

Stage 2 — Setting the context

As mentioned earlier, setting up the context is also a vital part of lesson delivery if you want your students to have the big picture of the class and see the lesson outcomes. This stage makes sure the students are on the same page during the sessions and don’t get distracted.

Here is what can be done.

Present one paragraph of the text (normally the first one), ask the students to read it, work in pairs and come up with ideas of what the text is going to be about. This ignites their interest and makes them competitive in coming up with the closest story to the original.

If the story has characters, places, events, take them out of the context and have the students recreate the story.

You can have the following for instance: “Jack, Mary, Joe, plane, storm, police”. Put the students in pairs and have them come up with possible stories. You will be surprised at how many stories the students come up with, sometimes better than the original one. When students are ready, read their stories out (let them read it themselves, or maybe pass around) to make sure everyone knows what the other teams’ stories were.

Stage 3 — Reading for gist

At this stage, your primary goal for the students is to compare the original story to the one they had come up with. You will need to highlight that they don’t need to worry about the unknown words. They simply need to get the general idea of the text.

This is what I normally do.

Split the text into 2 parts and put them on a PowerPoint presentation, different slides. Next, split the students into pairs and have them sit back to back, so that one of the students sees the slide and the other doesn’t.

Time the student who sees the slide for 2-4 minutes, depending on the length of the text and have him/her read it. Then, ask the students to change seats and give the other student an equal amount of time to read the text on the second slide.

When done, ask the students to face each other and tell their parts to each other trying to put the story together.

I really like this activity as it keeps the students more focused and is more challenging.

If the text is not that long, you can always go with the traditional “Read the text and comment on the following questions” task. This is a much easier way to cover this stage as a lot of textbooks offer follow up questions after a reading passage to convey the general meaning of the text. However, I would strongly recommend to look through those questions carefully before the class and maybe adapt them according to the level of your learners. Some of those questions can be too simple for your target group of learners.

In any case, at this stage it’s a good idea to have the students work in pairs/groups where they can help each other understand/find answers to some questions together. It will be less challenging for them and the weak learners will not feel under pressure.

Stage 3 — Vocabulary Work

This is the all famous “Vocab pre-teaching” stage, where we focus on the words that are new to our learners. A lot has been spoken about different ways of pre-teaching vocabulary, so, not to waste your time, have a look for some nice ideas here.

Stage 4 — Reading for Details

Once we have introduced the words that might be new to our students, it’s safe to move on to the next stage of teaching reading skills. At this stage, students go deeper in the text, try to learn more information, focus on details and read between the lines (for B2+ and higher level of learners).

Here is what can be done to make it more fun.

A traditional True or False exercise can be found in all the ESL/EFL books. How to make it more fun? — change the T/F statements into open ended questions. This will give the students a chance to generate more language while answering the questions. You can even create questions which have more than one possible answer. In this case you will also have your students speculating on the possible answers and have more speaking practice.

Once the students are done reading the text, you can turn it into a gap-fill exercise where they will need to fill in the missing information. This doesn’t have to be with the exact wording of the text (unless your focus is to work on the target language in the text). You can simply ask the students to fill in the gaps in a logical way that will not contradict the meaning of the text and will be lexically/grammatically correct. This is a very nice opportunity for the students to work not only with a simple task of gap fill, but also deal with sentence structures, synonyms, antonyms, etc.

Stage 5 — Controlled practice

This is the stage where students need to practice the language/structure of the text. Normally this stage is used to work on the target language presented at an earlier stage of the lesson.

Here are some activities that have proven to be useful.

If there is more than one character in the text, take them out, assign the students to act the roles of those characters and recreate the text by making a dialogue. However, you will need to make sure that the students are using the language you want them to. You can either put it on the board or ask them to highlight it in the text.

Another interesting activity can be conducting an interview. You will need to split the students in pairs and assign them the roles of an interviewer and the author/one character from the story, etc. The interviewer will need to ask different questions to their interviewee and keep the conversation going in the scope of the text and the story it covered.

My personal favourite is telling the story on behalf of some characters. You will need to assign a character from the story to each student (works best if you have more than 2 characters) and ask them to tell the story only on behalf of that character. For instance, if the text was about the “Little Red Riding Hood” and one of the characters is the grandmother, she will need to tell the story only known to her. This means, she will not know about her granddaughter visiting her that day, about her encounter with the wolf, etc. This activity can be really fun and creates a very warm atmosphere in the classroom.

Stage 6 — Fluency Practice

This final stage is to make sure the students can use the knowledge gained in real life situations. As we know, reading texts mostly serves to introduce vocabulary or grammar in ESL/EFL books. So, there are several activities you can do to give your students some nice practice.

Put your students in pairs/groups (depending on your class size), distribute some questions related to the topic of the lesson (“travelling” in our case) and ask the students to interview each other with those questions using the target vocabulary/grammar.

Here are some resources that you can use to come up with the questions.

You can ask the students to write a similar text to the one they had just read using the language/structure presented in the text. In this case the reading stage can be easily turned into a writing session. It works just great if you have a longer class (2-2.5 hours long) and want to cover 2 language skills. Later on, you can ask the students to pass the stories around, read them all and vote for the best one.

Well, these were some activities that I have learned, practiced and seen work during and long after my CELTA course. They always work like a charm. Try and let us know how it went in your classroom.

The Five Stages Of Reading

by Carolyn Caron and Cliff Ponder, Reading Instruction Specialists

The five stages of reading are essential for understanding written English. Each one must be mastered by the student, but they are not difficult if taught correctly.

First Stage Of Reading: Word Attack Skills

Words must be decoded in order to understand their meanings. Remember, letters are coded symbols. Reading involves learning the code and applying it to letters as they are grouped together to form words. Sometimes the code is quite simple, as with sounds of single letters in short words such as “bit” or “jam.” At other times the code is complex, as in such words as “augmentation,” in which the A-U makes its own unique sound and the T-I copies the sound of S-H. Or consider words like “classicism,” where the first C sounds like the letter K, and the second C copies the sound of S.

The rules governing the sound a particular letter makes in a given place are for the most part relatively simple, but are largely neglected in major reading instruction methods. For example, if only one sound of the letter A is taught, as in “at,” students may flounder when they see words such as “wad,” “war,” “ball,” or “foam.” And they need to know why that silent A is in “foam.” They also need to know all nine sounds of A.

Because more than 50 crucial elements are missing from the typical reading instruction method, much of the English-speaking world is locked in a plague of semi-literacy, or in the worst cases, illiteracy.

A small minority will learn to read regardless of the quality of instruction, but many bright students will never learn to read well because that crucial first step was omitted from their primary reading instruction at school.

Second Stage Of Reading: Comprehension

The entire brain must be involved in learning to read. Specialized areas of the brain control different functions. Only after the decoding process is fully operative can the brain be freed to higher level comprehension skills. When the initial reading instruction method includes all the skills needed for decoding words, meaning and content automatically occur in a natural, orderly and efficient process.

Third Stage Of Reading: Evaluation

Evaluation involves a careful assessment of that which has been read and comprehended. It involves a different area within the brain than that required for decoding and comprehension. For example, the statement, “Red is green,” will be evaluated for accuracy and consequently discredited if the individual words have been read and understood.

Fourth Stage Of Reading: Application and Retention

Once the information has been read and properly evaluated, it can be applied in a meaningful way by the reader. He or she can then decide what to accept or reject and how to apply it to his or her individual needs. Some of the information may be deemed to be irrelevant or inappropriate, and may be discarded.

Fifth Stage Of Reading: Fluency

When the first four steps are functioning comfortably, the reader usually finds that reading is a pleasant and effective way to learn and experience factors that would be inaccessible without the knowledge gleaned from reading.

If someone you know struggles with reading, examine the method used to teach them. It should include all the sounds and rules in an orderly, progressive sequence. When it does, reading becomes a positive, rewarding experience.

Comments by Reading Instruction Specialist
Glenn Davis On The Stages Of Reading

As you can see, all five stages of reading are necessary to be a good reader. They can be mastered by any age group for material at their level. Once the stages of reading are mastered, then expanding vocabulary and understanding of reading material advances naturally as the reader grows and matures. The key is having all five states of reading operating.

In many ways the five stages of reading are built like a skyscraper. To be successful, each stage depends on the stage before it. If the stage before it is missing or incomplete then we have a precarious building. I would not want to be going to the top floor in it!

Sadly, most reading instruction methods, even those which include some phonics, fail at the very first stage of reading. Their students are never taught all the skills necessary to master decoding words. Then the brain is distracted during the other stages of reading just trying to understand what the word is. The student suffers at all the other stages. Usually students who have conquered word attack skills naturally develop in the other four stages of reading. Students, who appear to have mastered word attack skills but still struggle with the other stages, may be reading in the wrong way, a way which forces the brain to work harder than necessary on stage one.

Of course, you know what I am going to say next. Academic Associates ensures that every student masters word attack skills and then goes on to each of the other steps as required.

Sign up for our complete reading program now.