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Reading as such is nowadays understood as a comprehension process that occurs when the reader extracts and integrates information from the text and combines it with what is already known (e.g., Koda, 2005: 4). According to the OECD (2000: 21), reading literacy can be defined as the ability “to understand, use and reflect on written texts in order to achieve one’s goals, to develop one’s knowledge and potential, and to participate effectively in society”. These comprehension skills depend, among other things, on reading speed, which requires a high degree of short-term memory. Other determinants of reading competence include world knowledge, the ability to rapidly access lexical items, broad and in-depth vocabulary knowledge, reading motivation, a positive attitude towards reading, knowledge of text features, reading strategies, and other basic cognitive skills (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF, 2007).

The reading process is characterized by an interaction of top-down and bottom-up processes (see e.g., Frisch, 2010; Thaler, 2012). In the latter, the reader recognizes meaning from the written text and moves from the individual parts to the whole, i.e., from letter, to syllable, to word, to phrase, to clause, to sentence, to paragraph and to the text (Grabe, 2009). In addition, meaning is derived via top-down processes with the reader at the center of the reading process: in order to infer meaning, s/he uses general background knowledge, world knowledge and thematic knowledge, formal schemata (e.g., knowledge of text genres and text structures), content schemata (e.g., knowledge about the time in which a text was written), and finally scripts (i.e., knowledge about typical processes, e.g., how to check in at a hotel). These two processes continually interact: “The ‘construction’ of meaning that occurs in reading is a combination of ‘bottom-up’ processes […] and ‘top-down’ ones […]” (Ur, 1996: 141).

L1 reading comprehension is generally preceded and affected by reading fluency. At a reasonable reading rate of approximately 250-300 words per minute, a reader is using very fast and efficient word recognition skills on the sublexical, lexical, and connected text levels, combining information from different sources while reading under rather intense time constraints (Grabe, 2010). That is to say, fluent reading includes both word-level reading skills and language processing/comprehension skills (e.g., Jenkins, Fuchs, Van den Broek, Espin & Deno, 2003). In general, reading fluency is associated with the ability to read rapidly with ease and accuracy, and to read with appropriate expression and phrasing. It involves a long learning process, and text comprehension is an expected result of fluent reading (see, e.g., Grabe, 2009).

Several developmental models of L1 reading have been put forward, most notably by Frith (1985) and Ehri (1995, see Kennedy, Dunphy, Dwyer, Hayes, McPhillips, Marsh, O’Connor & Shiel 2010 for a detailed review). Frith (1985) differentiated three stages, namely the logographic, alphabetic and orthographic stages. In the logographic stage, children use visual or graphic features to read words, while in the alphabetic stage, grapheme-phoneme relations are used to process words. In the orthographic stage, children are finally able to use spelling patterns. Ehri (1995) proposed a similar developmental model which comprises four phases of reading development to identify the significant advances that occur as children learn to read. The four phases are pre-alphabetic, partial alphabetic, full alphabetic and consolidated alphabetic. During the pre-alphabetic phase (which corresponds to Frith’s logographic stage) children rely on selected visual features (and not on letter-sound connections) to read words. Although they are essentially non-readers, they may ‘read’ environmental print from the contextual clues they notice. As children then learn the names and sounds of letters, they progress to the partial-alphabetic phase where they form connections between only some of the letters and sounds (often just the first and final letter sounds). During this phase they cannot segment sounds and will have difficulty decoding unfamiliar words, i.e., they do not have full knowledge of the alphabetic system yet. When children have reached the full-alphabetic phase, they learn sight words (i.e. words that are commonly used in reading and writing) and make connections between letters in written words and the corresponding sounds in speech; however, they use mainly grapheme-phoneme correspondences to identify words. Finally, the consolidated-alphabetic phase represents the children’s growing knowledge and use of specific orthographic patterns, as well as knowledge of morphological patterns and syllabic units.

Such models (as proposed by Frith, Ehri and others) have also been criticized because the order of the stages is fixed and identical for all children; because no stage can be skipped so that proceeding to the next stage results only from mastery of the previous stage; because performance in the middle of each stage is homogenous; and because progression is characterized by qualitative changes, as processing strategies seem to differ radically from one stage to the next (e.g., Sprenger-Charolles & Casalis, 1996).