Literacy levels: what are they. stages, and characteristics

Learning to read and write involves several phases in which children become familiar with letters and their sounds, in addition to understanding notions such as that long words imply being written with more letters and that short words with less.

Literacy levels they are a series of stages that every boy and girl goes through when learning to read and write. They were originally studied by the Argentine psychologist Emilia Ferreiro and then we will scale each of these stages to understand how literacy is acquired.

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What are literacy levels?

The literacy levels are the different phases that boys and girls go through during the process of learning to read and write. These levels were studied for the first time by Emilia Ferreiro, an Argentine psychologist, writer and pedagogue who exposed them in her work "Writing systems in child development" (1979). The levels of writing and those of reading are interrelated but, although they are similar, they imply different levels of improvement.

Generally, there are four stages that boys and girls go through when learning to write, these being the concrete, pre-syllabic, syllabic and alphabetic phases. Instead, the process of acquiring reading involves three phases, the pre-syllabic, the syllabic and the alphabetic.

The study of these literacy levels lies in the fact that it allows professionals to detect problems in children's cognitive development by seeing if there is some kind of delay in the acquisition of certain components of reading and writing.

Reading levels

As we have commented, boys and girls go through three stages when they are acquiring the ability to read, that is, the ability to interpret written texts: pre-syllabic, syllabic and alphabetic. Each of these phases is characterized by the presence or absence of two fundamental aspects to the time to understand how words are read and to understand written texts: qualitative and quantitative.

• Qualitative: it refers to the phonetic content of the word, what letters make it up and in what order they appear.
• Quantitative: refers to the number of letters that make up the word and whether it is long or short.

During the presyllabic stage of reading, boys and girls do not master either of these two aspects. However, the moment they manage to internalize the quantitative aspect, they advance to the syllabic stage and, once the qualitative one is also acquired, the alphabetic stage is reached.

1. Presyllabic stage

The first level of reading is the pre-syllabic stage. In this, if the child is asked to interpret the meaning of a word or written text, he will not be able to read them at all. This is due to the fact that he does not master either the quantitative or the qualitative aspects of reading, with which what the Infant will be to invent the meaning of what is written or, directly, will say that what he puts there does not mean any.

From what can be seen, at this stage the main component that infants use when “reading” is their imagination, interpreting written words in a totally arbitrary and even fanciful way.

For example, we can find explanations such as that long words are names of large objects, while short words are small objects. For some words this idea may work for them (p. eg, toad vs building) but for others not so much (p. eg, ant vs plaza).

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2. Syllabic stage

The syllabic stage is the second stage of the reading acquisition process and is reached when the child has internalized the quantitative aspect. From this moment, the infant is already able to differentiate mainly the size of the written word. However, as the child still does not understand the meaning of each of the letters, that is, he does not master the qualitative aspect of reading.

So we have a point at which the infant knows that long words are represented in written form with words with many letters, while the short ones have fewer letters but, since he doesn't know how each letter is pronounced, what he does is say words that seem to have the same length.

For example, if he sees the word "building" written, he may tell us that it means things that are so unrelated but that he knows as "apricot", "bird" or "bus", while something similar would happen with words more short.

What differentiates this level from the first is that in the syllabic stage the child makes an effort to read the word, using the finger to guide him as he tries to read. Thus, for the first time, the intention to interpret the written text appears instead of simply inventing the meaning.

3. Alphabetic stage

The alphabetical stage of reading It is reached once the infant has mastered the qualitative aspect, that is, it is capable of distinguishing the different letters from each other and interpreting their sounds. In this way the child tries to really read what is written there. It is only a matter of time before the infant acquires real reading ability from this point on.

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The levels of writing

The writing levels are almost the same as those found in reading, except that there is a pre-syllabic stage. The challenges that children face during the journey of acquiring writing are very similar to those in the reading, but not identical, which is why we found some differences. Thus, there are four levels of writing: concrete, pre-syllabic, syllabic and alphabetic.

1. Concrete stage

The specific stage of writing is one in which the infant is not yet able to understand the basics of how writing works or the shape of letters. Even so, he may want to start writing imitating adults, scribbling on a sheet of paper as if he were actually writing.

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2. Presyllabic stage

Children reach the presyllabic stage of writing when they have managed to write some letters, although they do not yet know very well what their meaning is.

Arrived at this point he is able to understand that each of the letters of the alphabet represents a different sound, and he will try to capture it with his peculiar writing.

He will try to demonstrate his knowledge of the alphabet by using different combinations of the letters he he has acquired to represent different words, although he still does not know what each of they. He will write randomly, being able to use a single letter to represent even syllables or whole words.

3. Syllabic stage

In the syllabic stage, the child does not yet fully know the sound that each letter represents, but tries to deduce it using the sounds he already knows to represent specific syllables. For instance, he may think that the letter "m" is always read as the syllable "me", and the letter "b" is read "be", and so on.

In this phase of the acquisition of writing, it can be observed that the infant is capable of dividing words into syllables and writing a little approximate of them, although he has not yet mastered the relationship between the written letters and the phonemes that he wants to represent on the sheet of paper.

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4. Alphabetic stage

Finally, we have the alphabetical stage of writing. This final stage of literacy is reached when the child discover what sound or sounds represent each of the letters of the alphabet and acquire the ability to combine them appropriately. From this moment on, the infant no longer has major problems with reading and writing.

Yes, it is true that, due to age and lack of practice, he may be a little slow in reading and writing, but the point is that he knows how to read and write. The only problems you are going to have at this point are spelling, having to refine your writing for good handwriting, as well as intonation, prosody, and speed when reading aloud.