Quote: "Young children often depend on phonics to sound out unfamiliar words, but older students develop other strategies that use phonological information as well as semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic cues to identify words" (Tompkins 197).
Comment: It is interesting to see how a first grader sounds out a word that he/she doesn't know compared to a fourth grader that doesn't know a word. The first grade will take a long time sounding out the word, each and every letter. With a fourth grader they will just ponder the word in their mind for a moment and then just say it how they think it sounds. It is interesting how you get more and more reading strategies as you get older and older.
Question: What grade should you teach students strategies that use phonological information, semantics, syntactic, etc. Or should it start in first grade?
I think you should start introducing it from the very beginning. Strategies build on each other and if you give the students a good foundation, they can elaborate on the skills when they are ready to. Students will always be on different levels so we need to prepare them according to their current ability, not their grade level.
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