What makes a good reader? Developing skills and habits

A child walking through the halls with their head down, reading.

One of your students in your library center, cuddled up with their book laughing.

A young person in bed, after lights out, flashlight illuminating the text, so they can read “one last chapter.”

Outward appearances would lead you to label these “good readers,” but what does that mean, and how did they get here?

Many feel the ultimate goal of reading is the extraction of meaning. A good reader reads for comprehension, but in some ways that may minimize the impact of deep reading. Deep reading allows us to develop connections to see ourselves in the world, understand abstract concepts, and connect to and empathize with others. Good readers are engaged in deep reading with exuberance, joy, and longing for more.

What makes a good reader? In this article, you’ll learn about some of the key factors that characterize a good reader. By the way, one of the misconceptions about a “good reader” is that they learned to read easily. Though a few of us may develop reading rather effortlessly (see Nancy Young’s Ladder of Reading and Writing), most of us require explicit instruction to learn to read. Before we go into what that instruction entails, let’s break down the characteristics and habits of a good reader.

Key characteristics of good readers

Good readers may make reading look effortless, but it takes a great deal of cognitive effort to build those neural pathways and functional areas that form a “reading brain.”

What does this look like? Key characteristics of good readers include:

• Understanding and recognizing grapheme-phoneme connections, patterns within words (such as syllable patterns), and meaningful units (morphology) as means to unlock written text
• Robust vocabulary (first orally, then through reading)
• Fluency as words are read with accuracy and automaticity (creating a bridge to fluent text reading with meaning and expression)
• Ability to read and write complex sentence structures in order to navigate the syntactic structure of text
• Utilizing comprehension strategies as they read (making connections, visualizing, inferring)
• Reading, reading, reading! Continually reading and frequently practicing so as to develop the ability to read increasingly sophisticated and complex text

Habits of a good reader

It’s natural to ask: what are the habits of a good reader? Is developing a love of reading helpful? The habits of a good reader go beyond the aforementioned characteristics and focus on what takes reading from something that’s done when necessary to something that’s done consistently and willingly. This can include observable behaviors such as reading daily, setting goals (think of doing something like completing a summer reading challenge), or exploring different genres or topics.

Good readers make a habit of reading for all different purposes: to inform, to entertain, to enrich, to connect, to learn. I’ve often been asked if we need to develop motivation in a student first, or a love of reading first before we teach them to read. I believe that sure, with exposure to good books early on, even in infancy, we can develop that love of reading and motivation to learn to read. But that is NOT a prerequisite to learning to read and loving reading!

How to develop reading skills

We know that the end goal of reading is joyful comprehension and motivation to read, but it all starts with the ability to read. Think of it this way: no matter what human endeavor you decide to pursue whether it be competitive skiing or basketball, you must start with the fundamentals. To help teachers develop their student’s reading abilities, we’ve simply broken it down into three pieces:

1. Knowledge
2. Instruction
3. Resources

Teachers must have a knowledge base to understand the process of learning to read and the instruction that supports that process.

Instruction is the key! I would assert that providing students with the right instruction empowering them to be successful readers fuels their motivation to read and secures a love of reading. I like to think of it as a “self-perpetuating cycle of reading success.” Strong foundational skills lead to the ability to decode words, leading to orthographic mapping for fluent reading. If we are fluent readers we tend to be much more engaged in reading—we are flowing across the text with accuracy, automaticity, and understanding—and that engagement leads to expanding vocabulary (from grade 3 on, most new words are learned via reading), which in turn allows a reader to develop robust academic language and content knowledge which supports deep comprehension.

That deep comprehension is what motivates us as readers. We have been taught well. We are successful. We can read with ease and understanding. We can’t wait to read more!

Finally, teachers need the high-quality resources to enact that instruction. Knowledge and resources serve instruction and instruction serves the reader. At 95 Percent Group, we have that winning combination that allows us to build the foundation for reading. Our approach is simple: using knowledge (professional learning) and resources (high-quality instructional materials) to build a foundation of literacy through explicit instruction.

Teaching beginner readers

Children don’t automatically intuit reading, so instruction is critical. It is important to remember that a beginning reader is compiling statistics about letters and words and that reading acquisition specializes in a brain area for the visual recognition of letter strings (graphemes) and establishes a functional link with areas coded for speech units (phonemes). Initially, this process of decoding words is laborious, as the beginning readers are converting each grapheme into a phoneme to recognize the word. Once recognized, if that word is in a reader’s “mental dictionary,” then the reader can read the word and assign it meaning. As this process automatizes, a reader can take a more direct route between word recognition and meaning. This is called orthographic mapping.

By forming those neural connections to unlock and “code” and connect words and meaning, this is where reading begins, but this is by no means where it stops. For the vast majority of us, this is not a naturally occurring unfolding of abilities. Intentionally designed, explicit instruction is required to shepherd a reader through this development.

Forming neural pathways is a remarkably similar process for all of us. As author and neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene tells us, “It is simply not true that there are hundreds of ways to learn to read. . . when it comes to reading we all have roughly the same brain that imposes the same constraints and the same learning sequence.”

Teaching all students

In addition to a solid instructional program led by knowledgeable responsive instructors, the environment matters. We have no control over whether children come to school from a print-rich or literacy-rich environment. We are responsible for teaching our students to read, full stop.

Therefore, we need to recognize the diverse backgrounds from which our students come and we need to meet them where they are and ensure that our school environment not only provides an intentional, research-aligned, structured literacy instructional system, but also surrounds them with books, print, and models of reading. These models should absolutely include our own excitement about reading and our love of reading. What we show, say, and do matters.

Supporting readers who may struggle

We are fortunate in that we have systems of assessment that will provide fast and efficient ways to screen all children to identify students at risk for struggles in reading. We also are obligated to find deep-dive diagnostic assessments, such as the 95 Literacy Intervention System, which pinpoint exact skill gaps students may be experiencing so that we can tailor instruction in Tier 2 and 3 to fill those gaps with targeted, explicit, intensive instruction.

We also want to provide frequent and targeted progress monitoring to ensure that our students are not caught up in the “cul-de-sac” of intervention. Our goal is to provide the right instruction at the right time for each student to keep them on track for grade-level proficiency.

We know the stakes are high. Many of our students who are not proficient readers in third grade will struggle to catch up and the consequences of continued struggle and low literacy are well-documented and dire. We don’t need to dwell on those statistics. What we need to do is ensure we have:

• Well-trained teachers who understand the predictable progression of development that our readers go through as they develop as readers
• A clear path of how instruction needs to be aligned with that development so that we can provide intentional, systematic instruction to all students in Tier 1
• Screening and diagnostic assessments that will target additional tiers of instruction for those students who need it
• An environment of reading joy, including great models of reading, and high-quality literature in both fiction and informational text, for reading aloud and/or eventual student-accessible reading
• Writing that parallels reading instruction, practice, and authentic opportunities for expression and learning
• Teachers who care about, nurture, and hold sacred our place in the advancement of literacy for our students and our world

Universal habits of good readers

Whether you’re a young student, an adolescent, or a senior citizen: what makes a good reader is universal. No matter what age, a good reader has an eagerness to read, an understanding of the power of reading, and a competence with the text in front of them. When I look at a middle school reader and a first-grade reader, a good reader has the same characteristics; it’s just where they are on the journey and  the level of sophistication and complexity of the text they’re able to encounter. In the background, they’re still the same person. They’re a person who has a sense of curiosity, a deep desire to read and find joy in it. That joy starts with  the ability to do it.

So what about the phrase  “learning to read vs.reading to learn”? The intention is that we teach students the basics of reading so they can eventually  grapple with complex, meaningful text, but the phrase itself is a bit problematic. It fuels the idea that in the early grades, we’re only about “skill and drill” and we don’t get into “real reading” until kids are older. That’s simply not true. The truth is, while students are learning to read, they have to be engaged in reading for meaning. Otherwise, how else will they sustain? Kids have to know that they’re learning these skills to serve a purpose, and that purpose is to read for entertainment, joy, and learning. We want everyone to be secure in the understanding that we pick up a book to learn, read, and thrive. We as educators want that for all the students whose lives we touch.

Expert Biography

Laura Stewart
Chief Academic Officer

Laura Stewart is a nationally recognized science of reading and structured literacy advocate, author, and expert who is building 95 Percent Group’s thought leadership position in the literacy market. Laura has dedicated her career to improving literacy achievement at leading education companies including The Reading League, Highlights Education Group, and Rowland Reading Foundation.

Sources

1. Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the brain: The new science of how we read. Viking.
2. Sargiani, R.D.A., Ehri, L.C., & Maluf, M.R. (2021). Teaching Beginners to Decode Consonant-Vowel Syllables Using Grapheme-Phoneme Subunits Facilitates Reading and Spelling as Compared with Teaching Whole-Syllable Decoding. Reading Research Quarterly 00(00), 1-20.  https://doi.org/10/rrq.432