In this chapter we will bring our discussion of the developmental model of reading to a close. It is not a finished effort-that would mean that we thoroughly understood all aspects of the problem and had a complete, articulated, validated model, which do not have. At this point, however, we need to take stock of what has been accomplished, and point to directions for future efforts in developing, refining, and validating the model of reading development. Then, we need to draw implications for education and training to improve the acquisition of reading competency, and of the oracy and conceptualizing competencies that serve as foundations for reading, and for learning by language in general.
The major thesis of the developmental model of reading which we are constructing is that the person comes into the world with certain basic adaptive processes which he uses to build a cognitive content and to acquire language competency. The bulk of this competency is verbal language competency, acquired and expressed by auding and speaking, respectively. In learning to read, the child uses the same cognitive content and languaging competencies used earlier in auding, plus the additional competencies involved in decoding print-to-language.
Literature was reviewed bearing on four hypotheses which must follow if the foregoing is an accurate statement of interdependencies among auding and reading:
Gracy reception (auding), vocabulary, and ability to comprehend language by auding ought to surpass reading vocabulary and ability to comprehend language by reading in the early years of schooling; this gap should close as the child acquires reading ability. Review of literature related to Hypothesis 1 indicated that, in the early years of schooling, languaging by auding was more effective than languaging by reading for receiving communication, whereas these processes became equally effective sometime around the seventh or eighth grades. Thus Hypothesis 1 was confirmed.