Stages of reading development by jeanne chall

Podcast Lecture 2

What is college reading?

I would like to take a few minutes to talk to you about college reading. Many people believe that students, who have progressed in their academic careers to the college level, are proficient readers with all of the skills necessary to read and understand complex material. If this were true, reading classes at the college level would be unnecessary and inappropriate. However, this is a very limited view of the reading process. Reading is a complex cognitive process. It is also a developmental process. Over 20 years ago, Jeanne Chall, a Harvard professor, outlined the stages of reading development from birth to college and beyond. By looking at this model of reading development, you can build an awareness of the skills necessary for success with the sophisticated and abstract material which you will encounter in higher education.

Chall’s model of reading development has five stages.

Stage 0 begins at birth and lasts for the first 4-5 years of a child’s life. During this stage the child is gaining control of his/her oral language and building a vocabulary.

Stages 1 and 2 are when the child is learning the mechanics of reading. This usually happens in the primary grades (K-3). During these stages the child learns that letters represent sounds and how the sounds blend together to make words. Decoding skills and fluency are practiced.

Stage 3 is when the reader uses the skills acquired to learn new information. In grades 4-8 students are exposed to a variety of texts and must expand their vocabularies and reading strategies to effectively process this new information.

In high school students are exposed to multiple points of view. Stage 4 reading requires that students develop their reading abilities to include critical analysis of these varying viewpoints.

Stage 5 reading is the type of reading that we will be engaged in throughout this course. This is college or adult level reading. Readers must construct meaning for themselves based on the analysis and synthesis of ideas encountered in their reading and their experience.

Chall describes this level of reading in the following manner.

“Reading is essentially constructive. From reading what others say the reader constructs knowledge for himself. The process depends upon analysis, synthesis and judgement.”

This type of reading involves being able to not only read the words on the page, but to use that information, together with your own knowledge to make inferences and construct new knowledge. Your existing knowledge and the way that it is organized is known as your schema. This is your understanding of how the world operates. It is based on all of your past experiences and background knowledge.

To demonstrate how your schema helps you to interpret what you read I would like you to listen to the following paragraph and try to determine what it is the four friends are doing when they get together on Saturday nights. Be sure to have some reasons to support your interpretation.

Every Saturday night, four good friends get together. When Jerry, Mike and Pat arrived, Karen was sitting in her living room writing some notes. She quickly gathered the cards and stood up to great her friends at the door. They followed her into the living room, but as usual couldn’t agree on exactly what to play. Jerry eventually took a stand and set things up. Finally they began to play. Karen’s recorder filled the room with soft and pleasant music. Early in the evening Mike noticed Pat’s hand and the many diamonds. As the night progressed, the tempo of the play increased. Finally, a lull in the activities occurred. Taking advantage of this, Jerry pondered the arrangement in from of him. Mike interrupted Jerry’s reverie and said, “Let’s hear the score.” They listened carefully and commented on their performance. When the comments were all heard, exhausted but happy, Karen’s friends went home.

One interpretation might be that the friends are coming together to practice playing music together. To support this interpretation your schema would have to include knowledge of musical notes, music stands, tempo, musical arrangements, and musical scores. You would also have to know that the recorder was a type of instrument. If your background was consistent with this knowledge this interpretation would make sense to you.

Another interpretation could be that the friends get together on Saturday night to play cards. To support this interpretation your schema would have to include knowledge of different card games and the scoring of card games, as well as the different suits in a deck of cards namely, hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades.

This example shows that what you bring with you to the reading experience has an effect on what you take away from the reading. By using your prior background knowledge and experience together with the information provided by the author you have successfully constructed knowledge for yourself.

To engage in this type of reading you will need to develop some high level thinking skills and attitudes. A study done by the National Center on Post-secondary Teaching, Learning and Assessment (Jones, 1996) identified the desired outcomes for college reading. Adults or college level readers should be able to understand the meaning and significance of a text. To accomplish this they must have the ability to identify explicit and implicit features, judge the credibility and strength of the claims made, apply what is known to new information to draw conclusions and solve problems, and monitor and correct their own thinking when comprehension breaks down. The readers’ attitudes about the use of these skills will also be a factor in their success as an effective college level reader. We will be concentrating on the skills of analysis, synthesis and evaluation as we attempt to improve our reading and thinking this semester.

In order to give you some tools to help you with this complex process, we will examine the steps of the reading process individually and discuss some strategies to use for each step. The reading process is a 3 step process. The steps include pre-reading (what you do before you read), active reading (what you do while you read) and post-reading (what you do after you read).

The first stage of the reading process that we will investigate is the pre-reading stage. When you first learned to read your teacher would walk you through this stage of the process by introducing you to the text with pictures and discussion meant to stimulate your thinking about the upcoming story and get you interested in reading it. You will usually read things better that you are interested in so one of the purposes of these pre-reading activities is to get you interested. The strategy that we will employ to this end is called previewing. When you hear the term preview you probably think of a movie preview. The purpose of a movie preview is to get you interested in seeing the movie. The way in which this is accomplished is by showing you scenes from the movie, introducing the characters (actors), and revealing the genre (action , adventure, comedy, science fiction, drama, musicals). The producers are hopeful that having watched the preview you will be compelled to pay for the full length feature.

Now let’s talk about a reading preview. Just like the movie preview the purpose is to get you interested in what you are about to read and to give you some information about it that you may be able to relate to your experience or background knowledge. The way to preview a reading selection is to look at the title, subheadings, pictures, graphs, or anything that stands out in the reading. In some cases you may need to read the first paragraph and the first sentence of the subsequent paragraphs if no sub-titles or pictures are provided. This is like viewing some scenes from the reading. As you skim the text, ask yourself questions, such as, What do I know about this topic? And What might this be about? Be sure to hypothesize answers to these questions as you proceed through the text. This procedure will give you a purpose for reading and help keep you focused on the text. You will be reading to see if your hypotheses were correct or incorrect. If you guessed right about the content of the piece or the author’s message you will be confirming your hypothesis. If you guessed wrong you will disconfirm your hypothesis. Either way, you will be focused on the text and actively involved in the reading.

This brings us to step two-active reading.

You are now ready to read the text carefully and actively with a pencil in your hand. This is the type of reading you will do when you need to learn something from print. Annotating while you read forces you to make choices about what you think is important and to reflect on your understanding of the author’s message.

During the preview you made some guesses/hypotheses about the content of the text and your careful reading will help you to confirm or disconfirm those hypotheses. As you read make notes in the margin that reflect your thinking about the text. Do you agree? Disagree? Have you had a similar experience or do you know about something that reminds you of the concepts or ideas that the author is discussing? Creating these notes will help you to stay focused and reviewing them later can be a helpful study resource.

Once you have finished reading the text it is a good idea to participate in a post-reading activity to help you organize and remember the ideas presented. Sometimes you will be asked to answer questions about a piece of writing or you may be given another assignment related to the reading. The post-reading activity that I recommend is to create a summary. Ask yourself, What was the point the author was trying to make? And How did the author support that point? Once you have identified these key ideas you should be better able to recall them when needed to build on your knowledge base.

This semester you will be called on to read a variety of materials. Now that you know a little bit about the complex nature of the reading process at the college level, I hope that you recognize the advantages to using the system described here including all the stages of the reading process. If you get comfortable with this process and adapt it to meet your individual needs and learning styles you can become a better reader and thinker and get the most out of your efforts in your academic endeavors.