How do readers change as they advance from

The Monkey and The turtle to Noli Me

Tangere?

From high school Biology laboratory manuals

to the latest scientific reports on the search
for extraterrestrial beings?

In short, how does reading develop from its

most primitive beginnings to its most mature
and highly skilled forms?
 All life forms have the capacity to
change and adapt to their environment.
Humans have the most remarkable
capacity to change throughout the course
of their lives. One area which humans
change qualitatively overtime is reading.
Do you know that a significant
proportion of changes in reading
performance occur during the years when
the typical child is in elementary school?
Researchers have found common
patterns of reading performance
among many readers of the same
age and amount of schooling.
These patterns seem to reflect a
unique stage of the individual’s
reading development. Reading
scholars who view reading as
development have attempted to
identify and described such
stages.
 Written/
Oral
Experience Printed
Language
Symbols

A B C
Relationship of three types of knowledge used in reading

Oral language consists of symbols that stand for

experiences.
The written/printed symbols that represent oral
language are, therefore, also a representation of
experiences.
According to Jennings, the reading of
Circle C is the culmination of all other
kinds of reading. We cannot read Circle
C unless we have become “skilled in all
other kinds of reading,” that is Circle A
and B.

The relationship of the three circle is

also reciprocal.
 Fries’s Three Stages of Reading
Stage 1: The transfer stage
• The child learns a new set of signals – the
visual symbols (letters, spelling patterns,
punctuation marks) that stand for the
auditory symbols (the oral language) that he
already knows.
• Before transfer can take place, the child shall
have already learned to speak and
understand a language through listening.
We might call this stage as the learning to
read period.

Learning to read, says Fries, means

developing a “considerable range of
habitual responses to a specific set of
patterns of graphic shapes.”
Fries advices us not to look at the
teaching of beginning reading to children
in terms of imparting new knowledge.
That is, the child is not learning a new
language. He is not learning new words
nor new meanings for words he already
knows. The one thing he is learning is a
set of visual symbols that stand for
auditory symbols he has already learned.
Types of graphic shapes to be learned
during the transfer stage

The space-direction sequence

• In speech, words are represented by
sounds produced in a sequence.
• In writing, the patterns of graphic
shapes must in some way represent
this sequence.
  In Filipino and English, it is a horizontal
sequence of letter groups in parallel lines
from left to right.
 In Arabic writing, the space-direction used is
also horizontal, but from right to left.
 Chinese writing uses a vertical sequence
proceeding from top to bottom, in columns,
beginning at the right, with each successive
column to the left of preceding one.

• The space-direction sequence used in the

language is entirely arbitrary.
The identification of letters (the alphabet)

 learning the ABCs

 pronouncing the letters in the correct order

Fries emphasize that it is essential to reading at

the beginning that pupils have already
developed such an ability to identify and
distinguished the graphic shapes of the letters
as can be shown by instant and automatic
responses of recognition.
Fries recommends that, initially, the child
should work with a limited number of letters.

AT-HAT HAT-MAT BAT-RAT

MAT-MAP-NAP TAP-PAT-FAT
Other Graphic Shapes
a. The numerals, specifically Hindu-Arabic
numerals, that stand for the number words
the child already knows orally:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

b. The graphic signs for the mathematical

processes, which are also word signs like the
numerals, such as:

+ - =
 c. Abbreviations representing words or
sequence of words.
Mr. Dr. AM.
Mrs. Ms. P.M

• Punctuation marks
Graphic signs not found in oral language
(period, question mark, comma,
exclamation point, colon, semicolon, etc.)
• Language signals
– Not represented in writing, such as
intonation patterns.

Fries says that the transfer stage is

complete when the child responds “ as rapidly
and as accurately” to the visual symbols that
represent a message as he does to the auditory
symbols they replace. Of course this applies
only to message about things within the child’s
own experience.
 Stage 2: The productive stage

– The child reading becomes fluent and

automatic that he no longer pays conscious
attention to the shapes and patterns of the
letters on a page.

– The child can now pay more attention to the

construction of meaning beyond the literal
information of the text.
Stage 3: The vivid imaginative
realization of vicarious experience
(VIRVE)

– This occurs when the reading process

becomes so automatic that reading is used
“equally with or even more than, live
language in acquiring and developing of
experience.”
– Reading is used for different purposes and as
a tool for learning a broad range of
information.
Fries ends his discussion of the stages of
reading, with this thought:

Learning to read has no end. We believe that

now know better than formerly where to begin
and how. We believe that we must give through
and systematic practice not only through the
transfer stage but through the building up of a
superior ability to read productively. Nor must
we stop before we go as far as possible in
teaching our student to really read literature.