Stages of Reading

Stage 1:
Logographic/
Pictorial

Stage 2:
Alphabetic/
Phonological

Stage 3:
Orthographic

A child at this stage has not yet grasped the logic of writing. As a result, the
visual system of the brain attempts to recognize words as though they were
objects and faces. The brain relies on all the available visual features
including shape, color, letter orientation, angles, curves, etc. The popular
Teach Your Baby to Read program relies on the visual system of the brain to
read words, not the reading brain.
At this stage, the child typically has basic recognition of a few words, including
his name and some meaningful environmental print.
The size of this print vocabulary varies significantly among children.
Frequent errors reveal that the child does not decode the internal structure of
words, but only takes advantage a few insignificant cues. For example, words
that are visually similar are confused. Recognition of the words is often
dependent upon font, style, location, and color, and the word cannot be
generalized to related words. (For example, the child cant read Coca
independent of Coca-Cola.)
These errors suggest that the childs brain is attempting to map the general
shape of words directly onto meanings, without paying attention to individual
letters and their pronunciation.
At this stage, whole words cease to be processed. The child learns to attend
to smaller elements such as isolated letters and relevant letter groups.
The child links graphemes to the corresponding speech sounds and practices
assembling them into words. He/she can now even sound out unfamiliar
words.
The first years of reading instruction lead to discovery that speech is made up
of phonemes, which can be recombined at will to create new words. The
development of this phonemic awareness is not automaticit requires explicit
teaching of an alphabetic code.
When a childs brain learns to decipher an alphabetic script, the brains visual
areas learn to break down the word into letters and graphemes. Some of the
speech areas must adapt to the explicit representation of phonemes.
At this stage, there is automatic recognition of many words through a vast
lexicon of visual units of various sizes.
Word length ceases to play a role. Expert readers read words using a parallel
procedure that takes in all letters at once, at least in short words (eight letters
of fewer).
The reader is able to read fluently and comprehend what is read. The reading
process has become efficient in the brain.

Not all readers will go through all of these phases. For example, dyslexic learners often get stuck at
the alphabetic stage, or they never master it and attempt to move on to the orthographic stage.
Approximately 3% of the population teaches themselves to read. These precocious readers may
move through the first and second stages almost undetected.
Both whole words and phonics have their place in the teaching of basic literacy, but the eventual aim
is to bring readers to the orthographic stage.
Frith, U. (1986). A developmental framework for developmental dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia,
36, 67-81.