Pre-reading Skills, a Classification System

The pre-reading domain includes the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that are precursors to children's ability to read and write, and the environments that support those abilities. Thirty years ago, people interested in this topic would have called it reading readiness and would have focused on those skills that children need to be taught in kindergarten, such as names of letters of the alphabet. Today, we know that the precursors to literacy start at a much earlier age than kindergarten. Thus we approach literacy as a developmental continuum that starts early in life and merges into conventional reading and writing. Learning the names of letters of the alphabet is still important, very important, but it is but one step in a process that begins much earlier in a child's life.

As illustrated in this figure, children's attitudes about print, for example, whether they enjoy being read to, and their pre-reading skills, for example, whether they have good vocabularies and know something about how print works, affect their later reading. And both their skills and their attitudes are affected by their environment -- for example, being read to frequently by a loving parent.

A few years ago, I and my colleague Christopher Lonigan proposed a broad division of pre-reading and conventional literacy into two interrelated domains: outside-in and inside-out. This distinction proved useful to many people as a way of thinking about pre-reading, and it has subsequently been validated by research.

The outside-in domain represents children's understanding of information outside of the particular printed words they are trying to read. It depends on knowing the meanings of words, having conceptual knowledge of the subject of the written text, and understanding the print that has come before the word being read. The inside-out units represent children's knowledge of the rules for translating the particular writing they are trying to read into spoken words.

Imagine a child trying to read the sentence, "She sent off to the very best seed house for five bushels of lupine seed," from the award winning children's picture book, Miss Rumphius. Being able to say the sentence from the print on the page depends on knowing letters, sounds, and links between letters and sounds. These are inside-out processes, which is to say that they are based on and keyed to the elements of the sentence itself. However, a child could have the requisite inside-out skills to read the sentence aloud and still not read it successfully. What does the sentence mean?

Comprehension of all but the simplest of writing depends on knowledge that cannot be found in the word or sentence itself. Who is the "she" referred to in the sentence above? Why is she sending away for seed? Why does she need five bushels? What is lupine? In short what is the narrative, conceptual, and semantic context in which this sentence is found, and how does the sentence make sense within that context? Answering these questions depends on outside-in processes, which is to say that the child must bring to bear knowledge of the world, semantic knowledge, and knowledge of the written context in which this particular sentence occurred.

A child who cannot translate a sequence of graphemes into sounds cannot understand a written sentence, but neither can a child who does not understand anything about the concepts referred to in the sentence and the context in which the sentence occurs. Outside-in and inside-out processes are both essential to reading, and work simultaneously in readers who are reading well.

Let's unpack both the outside-in and inside-out domains into some of the component skills that we know to be important precursors of learning to read.

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