Anyone who lives in a big city will tell you that you can differentiate natives from newcomers instantly. The obvious flags: a person standing on a street corner, consulting a map. A group on the subway, guidebooks in hand. What makes these distinctions so apparent? At what point does someone transition from a tourist to a resident? What does that look like internally, and from the outside?
A newcomer’s experience in the big city reflects the intricacies of learning to read. Literacy is amazingly complex, relying on multifaceted and interwoven layers, which build on and influence each other as we make meaning from written language. So what does this process look like?
Early Exposure
Early reading exposure is a lot like exploring a big city with a friend who lives there. You begin learning about the city’s layout passively, through exposure. You don’t need to know the routes when you are together, because your friend serves as your guide. You casually notice landmarks or street names along the way, without attending to where they are in relation to where you are going. Still, they serve as a visual anchor for future excursions.
In the same way, when children are read to from a young age, they develop familiarity and practice in the art of reading before they themselves are text-ready. While being in the passenger seat doesn’t equip you to independently know where to go, it does give you a basis for forming your own understanding.
Phonemic Awareness & Phonics: Decoding
But, when you first explore the city alone, you are bombarded with new information. To process it, you build a foundation for navigating independently by following a set of rules. A newcomer in New York, for instance, does this by realizing that the city streets are laid out in a grid. Generally, streets are numbered chronologically and transverse the city east to west. Avenues are also numbered chronologically and run up and down the city, north to south. By directly learning and practicing these ‘rules of the road,’ the newcomer internalizes a key to decode the new city.
In reading, too, you start by learning the rules: phonemic awareness, phonics, and decoding – an understanding of letters, sounds, and syllables: what they represent, how they interact. These patterns provide early readers with a map to decode and encode words. So once you’ve learned that the letter ‘S’ makes a “sssss” sound, and the short ‘A’ an /a/ sound, you can add a ‘T’ and figure out that the word is pronounced “sat.” Once you’ve learned the /p/ and /d/ sounds, you can apply that knowledge to manipulate the sounds to decode other words like sap, sad, pad, and pat.
Irregular Patterns and Exceptions
Simple, right? A city is a grid. Each letter makes a different sound. Unfortunately, as you spend more time in New York, you might realize that not all Streets have numbers, especially downtown, and that several Avenues have different names, too; some even cross over each other in the middle of the city!
In reading, new rules and certain exceptions also continue to arise. You learn that while the letter ‘A’ makes a short /a/ sound in words like ‘rat’ and ‘hat,’ it makes a long /ā/ sound once you add an ‘e’ to the end, like in ‘rate’ and ‘hate.’ And bizarrely, “have” uses the short /a/ sound, in spite of its final e. With practice, you learn that know is different from no, and that p’s before n’s are silent. But as you learn the new patterns and even the exceptions, you start to feel grounded again, like you have a sense of how to get where you’re going.
Fluency, Comprehension, and Making Meaning
Once you can accurately and automatically decode words, you learn the rules for stringing them together into phrases: fluency. Fluency is important for comprehension, and it relies on an understanding of cues much like stoplights and crosswalks in a city. With practice, you learn to read more quickly, more fluidly, and with expression.
To really get to know a city, you must also know the intangibles, the more subtle cues and cultural connaissances. Where are the best running routes? Which coffee shops have the best bagels? When is it smart to take a cab, and when will the subway be infinitely faster? These are learned over time, layer by layer, through engagement.
So, too, in reading. Readers learn to make inferences, use context clues, and develop subject-specific vocabulary. You can only understand a sentence like “her flight was delayed,” when you know: how to sound out and string together those words, that “her” is a pronoun standing for a female, that “flight” involves an airplane, that “delayed” means late, and that airplanes sometimes don’t arrive on time.
Mastery
When you learn to live in a new city, you integrate foundational rules, exceptions, facts, feelings, and significant amounts of real-time practice in overlapping strands and layers. You learn some things directly, some implicitly, some in isolation, and others in relation to each other as you make meaning of the city around you. And soon enough, you know how to get from one neighborhood to another using two different subway lines and which direction you must walk when you emerge from underground to make sure you’re heading towards your final destination. And if one subway line is closed for the day, you even know an alternate option to get where you’re going.
With literacy, too. You internalize rules to decode words, sentences, and stories. You pull in experience to understand when they don’t apply: background knowledge, vocabulary, and an understanding of idioms, cultures, dialects, and nuance. You have all the tools and practice to fluidly interpret new words, contexts, and concepts. You are a reader when you predict and visualize and infer and decode and synthesize and articulate seamlessly: making meaning from text to internalize a new narrative or topic. As a reader, you have the power to learn anything, to lose yourself in someone else’s story, to access the written world around you.
You develop proficiency by learning the rules and routes, the letters and words. But you develop mastery through millions and millions of moments. In the end, you become a New Yorker by living in New York. And you become a reader between the pages of the books you love.