example: ‘cats and dogs’. The sentence ‘ It is raining cats and dogs’ does not make any sense by its lateral meaning (cain, 2010). For skilled reading, it is necessary to figure out all idiomatic expressions of a text.
To explain the reading acquisition and development several language based theory developed. Although such models are criticized often (Pearson, 1976) but for the richer understanding of acquisition of reading and related skills, the importance of such models are undeniable. As the aim of this essay is not review Models of reading, in this section few language based model are discussed in order to explain development of reading skills with particular attention given to phonological awareness and decoding:
Frith’s Model of Reading Acquisition: One of the influential models of reading acquisition is Firth’s three-phase model of reading proposed by Uta Frith (1985). According to this model a typically developed person has to be master in the logographic, alphabetic and orthographic phases (Frith, 1986). In logographic phase children are dependent on visual recognition. They are unable to decode the unfamiliar words because they cannot understand the phoneme grapheme correspondence. They can recognize familiar words or special symbolic words (for example: logos of popular chocolate). In alphabetic stage, children able to decode new words by sequencing letter sound (Frith, 1986). Finally, in orthographic phase children instantly recognize morphological conventions (for example: ‘S’ for plural) (Frith, 1986).
This model modified by Ehri (2005). She divided the alphabetic phase into pre-alphabetic and partial alphabetic phases (Ehri, 2005). The pre-alphabetic phase associated with visual recognition, which is similar with Frith’s logographic phase (Ehri, 2005). The partial alphabetic phase start with learning of phoneme and grapheme correspondence and decoding the words (Ehri, 2005). She mentioned that, when children can learn to form sight words by connecting letters and phonemes they can become complete alphabetic phase readers. This model emphasise on written word decoding to describe word-reading skills. On the other hand ‘psycholinguistic Model of Reading (Goodman, 1969 & Pearson, 1976) and ‘Simple View of Reading’ ((Gough & Tunmer, 1986) highlighted that spoken language skills such as vocabulary, semantics, grammar are also important for ultimate reading comprehension.
Psycholinguistic Model of Reading: The psycholinguistic view of reading is rooted an attempt to understand how language works for carrying meaning (Pearson, 1976). Three types of information need to be processed when readers read some printed information (Goodman, 1969). The first type information is called graphophonic or grapho-phonemic which involves with explicit or implicit phonemic manipulation, phonics generation and phoneme-grapheme correspondence. The second type of information that readers processed is syntactic information, which includes systematic relationships among words and grammatically acceptable sentences (Pearson, 1976). The third kind of informat
