Reading Development and Teaching

Citation

Stuart, M., & Stainthorp, R. (2016). Reading Development and Teaching. SAGE Publications.

Chapter Summary

The book has ten chapters in four parts and about 240 pages. Its organising idea is the Simple View of Reading, which holds that reading depends on word reading and language comprehension working together: after a tutorial part that lays the groundwork, one part follows each of the two dimensions from skilled reading through development to teaching, and a final part covers assessment and the two main kinds of reading difficulty. Each chapter opens with a summary linking it to the previous one and closes with a short section of "closing words".

Part 1: Tutorial Review

Chapter 1: Essential knowledge about language

Starting from a cross-European study in which English-speaking beginners learned to read words more than twice as slowly as children learning Finnish, Spanish or Greek, the chapter asks why English is so hard. It introduces the phonemes of English with their IPA symbols, defines phoneme, morpheme and syllable (including onset, rime and body), compares logographic, syllabic and alphabetic writing systems, and analyses English orthography grapheme by grapheme, ending with inconsistent spellings such as the many pronunciations of OUGH. Short exercises help readers turn their implicit knowledge of spelling into explicit knowledge.

Chapter 2: The Simple View of Reading: a broad conceptual framework

Sets out the authors' version of the framework and argues that it serves as a conceptual guide while acknowledging that it does not describe everything involved in reading.

Part 2: Reading Words on the Page

Chapters 3–5: Visual word recognition in skilled readers; Development of visual word recognition processes; Teaching word reading skills

Chapter 3 explains how skilled adults read written words, distinguishing direct visual word recognition from phonological recoding. Chapter 4 traces how children develop these processes, from learning letters and their sounds to the first orthographic representations, which, the authors argue, depend on phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge. Chapter 5 turns this into teaching, addressing practical questions such as when to start letter work, which letters are easiest, whether to teach upper or lower case first and whether to teach letter names or sounds first.

Part 3: Understanding spoken and written language

Chapters 6–7: Development of comprehension of oral and written language; Teaching to develop reading comprehension

Chapter 6 covers the language comprehension dimension: the roles of vocabulary, morphology, syntax and pragmatics, mental models of a text, inference, story structure and comprehension monitoring. Chapter 7 reviews explicit and implicit vocabulary teaching and their combination, then strategy instruction (comprehension monitoring, graphic organisers, questioning and summarising), with the teacher modelling strategies aloud.

Part 4: Assessment and intervention

Chapters 8–10: Assessing word reading skills and reading comprehension; Teaching to overcome word reading difficulties (developmental dyslexia); Treating reading comprehension difficulties

Chapter 8 discusses assessment in the classroom and school and at national and international level, including England's statutory tests and the PIRLS international study, as well as group and individual diagnostic tests. Chapter 9 defines developmental dyslexia with reference to the Rose Report, discusses how children with poor word reading are identified and how they differ, and suggests ways to address weaknesses in phonological recoding and lexical processing. Chapter 10 treats children whose difficulty lies in comprehension, discussing reciprocal teaching, the Reading for Meaning programme and the role of working memory.

Key Concepts

Part 1: Tutorial Review

• Orthography: the writing system of a language and how it maps onto speech; English orthography is inconsistent, which slows early word reading.
• Phoneme, grapheme and syllable structure: the units that phonics teaching works with, including the onset, rime and body of a syllable.
• Simple View of Reading: reading as the combination of word reading and language comprehension, the framework for the whole book.

Part 2: Reading Words on the Page

• Visual word recognition: recognising familiar written words directly from their spelling.
• Phonological recoding: translating letters into sounds to read words, especially unfamiliar ones.
• Letter-sound knowledge and phoneme awareness: the early skills the authors place at the foundation of children's first word representations.

Part 3: Understanding spoken and written language

• Mental model: the representation of a text's meaning that readers build, supported by inference and knowledge of story structure.
• Comprehension monitoring: noticing when understanding breaks down.
• Strategy instruction: teaching strategies such as questioning and summarising through explicit modelling until students use them independently.

Part 4: Assessment and intervention

• Developmental dyslexia: a difficulty in learning to read words accurately and fluently, defined here with reference to the Rose Report.
• Specific comprehension difficulties: weak understanding despite adequate word reading.
• Reciprocal teaching: a structured, discussion-based approach used to improve comprehension.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Research linked to teaching at every stage. The parallel structure takes each dimension from skilled reading through development to classroom teaching, so practical recommendations follow from the evidence presented. Hakan Demiröz's review in The Reading Matrix (2017) found the answers in the word-reading teaching chapter very helpful for practitioners.
• Strong linguistic grounding. Chapter 1 gives a careful account of English phonology and orthography, with exercises, and explains why English is harder to learn to read than more consistent alphabetic languages.
• Accessible presentation. Demiröz noted the chapter summaries and closing words, the plentiful tables and figures, and a step-by-step approach that keeps a synthesis of about 300 references accessible.
• Both kinds of difficulty. Separate intervention chapters for word reading difficulties and for comprehension difficulties mirror the framework.

Limitations

• Selective treatment of comprehension strategies. Demiröz observed that, beyond inference and comprehension monitoring, the range of strategies skilled readers use is not covered comprehensively, and that the discussion of the framework and of assessment could be fuller.
• Fewer classroom tips than some readers want. The same review would have liked more practical tips for teachers; the book explains why methods work rather than offering lesson plans.
• English as a first language, in England. The focus is on children learning to read English as their first language, with assessment examples from the English system; readers working with second-language learners or in other systems will need to adapt.
• Reading only. The chapter list deals with reading; readers who also need to teach writing will need another text.

Where It Fits in the Course

Stuart and Stainthorp is the most direct bridge in this course between reading research and classroom teaching. Kate Cain's Reading Development and Difficulties uses the same Simple View of Reading and the same split between word reading and comprehension but is written from psychology and spends more time on models and theories; reading Cain for the research and this book for its teaching implications works well. Mark Seidenberg's Language at the Speed of Sight is a general-audience account of the same science with a strong argument about how reading is taught.

Tompkins, Rodgers and Rodgers's Literacy for the 21st Century is a broader teacher-education text on reading and writing in elementary classrooms, with step-by-step instructional procedures, useful for readers who want the practical detail this book leaves out. For research depth, The Science of Reading: A Handbook, edited by Snowling, Hulme and Nation, gathers specialist reviews on the same topics, and Jeanne Chall's Learning to Read: The Great Debate supplies the history of the argument over beginning reading instruction.

How to Use This Book

The book is addressed to teacher educators, teachers, educational psychologists and others involved in teaching children to read. No background in linguistics or psychology is assumed, but Chapter 1 is technical, with IPA symbols and grapheme-by-grapheme analysis, and should be worked through slowly.

A suggested plan:

• Begin with Part 1. Do the exercises in Chapter 1 rather than skimming; the terms it introduces are used throughout. Chapter 2 provides the map for everything that follows.
• Primary trainees and early-years teachers: prioritise Chapters 4 and 5 on developing and teaching word reading, then Chapters 6 and 7 on comprehension.
• Special educational needs staff and psychology students: read Part 4 after the relevant development chapters, since the intervention chapters build on them.
• Assessment: Chapter 8 is worth reading alongside current national assessment documents, since policy details change.

While on placement, try to classify individual pupils' strengths and weaknesses along the two dimensions of the Simple View, and compare what the book recommends with the school's phonics and comprehension programmes. For essays, follow up the studies cited in each chapter and the specialist reviews in the course handbook.