ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the relationship of oral language to written language as presented in the developmental model of auding and reading (the Audread model) presented by Sticht, Beck, Hauke, Kleiman, and James (1974) and by the writings of Fries (1963). Fries made several points that have been further developed in the Audread model:
He distinguished meanings from language and language from the stimulus displays used to convey the language. Thus three components are involved in the communication process: meanings or thoughts, language as an internal representation of thoughts, and speech or writing as an external representation of the internal language signals.
Reading involves the use of internal language representations of thoughts that are the same as those used earlier in comprehending spoken language. Following Brown (1954), we call the latter process auding. Auding developmentally precedes reading, and reading and auding use the same language signals.
Auding and reading use the same language system for representing the same thoughts, that is, they share the same meaning system. Thus in learning to read people learn to comprehend by reading what they could previously comprehend by auding.
With sufficient practice, readers not only come to comprehend by reading what they previously could comprehend only by auding, but they also become as efficient at developing internal language signals from the written display as they are at deriving internal language signals from speech displays. This occurs as the decoding component of reading becomes automatic.
