Reporter: ORIBADO, Christian Jay N.

BEEd IV-A
DEVELOPMENTAL READING 2
Characteristics of an Emergent Reader & Stages of the Reading Process
Characteristics of an Emergent Reader
Emergent reading pertains to the first stage in child’s growth toward literacy.
Particularly, this stage to the beginning experiences or the child’s first experiences with
print in the home and continues through early years of formal schooling. However, this
reading behavior does not begin at a particular age but emerges continually, thus the
term called emergent reading.
Harris and Hodges (1981) refer to this period of acquiring the specific skills and
abilities that allow reading to take place as preparedness or reading readiness. The child’s
preparedness allows him/her to cope with a learning task. This is significantly determined
by a complex pattern of intellectual, motivational, maturational and experiential factors.
Further, reading readiness is viewed as a set of social, emotional, physical and cognitive
competencies.
Since the beginning of emergent reading is not determined at a particular age, it
is helpful to recognize the various stages of reading development that a child undergoes
and to monitor his/her progress through these stages. Children pass through stages at
different levels of maturity. Similarly, not all children pass through all stages of reading,
all at the time and in the same order. Most significantly, each child is identified as an
individual emergent reader developing at his/her own pace and rate.
Readers at this level are developing letter knowledge – recognizing upper and
lower case letters and their common sounds (consonant and short vowel). Before
mastering this level, they will begin to develop a bank of high frequency words, commonly
referred to as sight words.
While apparent to most adults, a child must learn the one-to-one matching of
individual spoken words to printed words. For example, the spoken sounds of
“wunsupunatim” represents the following words: once upon a time. They are also
grasping sentences and becoming aware of punctuation.
Early emergent readers are also learning and practicing reading strategies. They
rely on pictures and contextual clues to understand the text. They can retell a simple story
and make a connection between what they know and what they just read.
Ideal Reading Material for Early Emergent Readers:
When selecting books for an early emergent reader, look for the following characteristics:

 Each page displays the print in the same place

 Sentences are written in a pattern (1-2 sentences repeated)
 Illustrations provide support for the text
 Contains familiar objects (e.g. dog, letters of the alphabet) and experiences (e.g. going
to school)
 Contains and repeats high frequency words
Stages of the Reading Process
Marie Clay (1991) and Fountas and Pinnell (2001) have noted five main stages of literacy
development that relate to both reading and writing.
STAGE 1: EMERGENT READERS
 Ranges from 2 to 7 years old
 Begin to familiarize with the concepts of print to:
 directionality,
 one-to-one correspondence between spoken and written, and
 value of picture clues to the meaning of story
 Develop an understanding that printed word carries main meaning of a story
 Begin to make text-to-world connections
STAGE 2: EARLY READERS
 Between ages of 5 to 7
 Rely more heavily on the printed text than on the pictures on a book
 Begin to develop word recognition strategies
 Begins to develop a data bank of sight words that allows them to read with
increased speed as they are read more often
 A teacher may have a class containing both emergent and early readers
STAGES 3: TRANSITIONAL READERS
 Range from 5 to 7 years
 Able to read in meaningful phrases with comfortable pace and appropriate voice
intonation
 Able to enumerate the four cueing systems into their reading with little disruption
to meaning and flow
 Able to read more lengthy texts with a little reliance on pictures for text meaning
STAGE 4: SELF-EXTENDING READERS
 Range in age 6 to 9 years of age
 Readers progress into reading independence in the fourth developmental stage
 Often read variety of textual genres and use reading as a tool for gaining new
knowledge
 Able to read more complex texts and begin to read for a variety of purposes
SATGE 5: ADVANCED READERS
 These readers who have attained a level of mastery with reading over the age of
9
 Become proficient in reading and in comprehending various text sources
 They enjoy reading and use reading as a means of gaining knowledge
 They can also read fluently and can interpret texts
 They connect what they have read to themselves to other texts and to the world
around them
 They have internalized a series of reading strategies that are used interchangeably
as they different texts
FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN EMERGENT READER

Perceptual Oral Cognitive Affective Home

Factors Language Factors Factors Environment
Factors Factors
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REFERENCE
Servillano, Marquez T. Jr. et al., Developmental Reading 2, Lorimar Publishing, Inc.,
Quezon City, 2009.