Some of the difficulties faced by second language learners who are continuing to acquire English at the same time as they start to read simple extended English texts are illustrated. Specific focus is on the question of how writers of early reading material can best help such learners to understand the relationship between spoken and written…

Recounted in these two very brief papers are ways a mother arranged the home environment to teach basic skills to her 2-year-old child while enabling her daughter to play in a constructive way. The first paper focuses on learning colors and letters, storyreading at bedtime, and beginning reading activities when the child started to speak.…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) is the most significant and controversial change in federal education policy since the federal government assumed a major role in American education almost four decades ago. In many ways, it is the most startling departure in federal educational policy in American history. It is hard to imagine that…

Documents the wide gap between current research on early literacy development and various guidelines and tools for assessing variations in preschool program quality, reviewing three position statements as to their changing treatment of literacy and comparing them to various guidelines, criteria, and tools for assessing the quality of early…

Links current research on effective reading instruction with current theory and research on school governance and reform, beginning with an overview of historical approaches to reading curriculum and instruction and presenting current research on effective early literacy practices for K-3 students. Concludes with a discussion about school…

Early language competence in preschool relates both directly and indirectly to elementary school reading in both 1st and 3rd grades. Further, comprehensive language skills are more strongly related to early reading than are vocabulary scores alone. In response to a challenge by S. A. Bracken (2005), the current article reaffirms the National…

Families are children's first educators and play a critical role in young children's literacy development. Young children's success as readers is related to their early literacy experiences in the home. Family literacy practices determine young children's literacy skills prior to formal instruction. However, families may not be aware of best…

This project report describes pilot programs of the Ames Community School District for two school years, 1973-74 and 1974-75. The purposes of the pilot programs were to ascertain whether objectives were met, to consider the appropriateness of activities and materials, to determine the validity of the test measure, to assess the degree to which…

Proposes that the illiteracy problem should be addressed by encouraging children's love of reading while they are developing reading skills. Analyzes why current programs are ineffective and recommends following the approach of the "Open Sesame Program" in New York City, which employs creative methods to teach English to Spanish-speaking…

This is the first article in a three-part series on the use of CD-ROM storybooks, poetry collections, and writing programs to motivate beginning readers. This initial article discusses the usefulness of CD-ROMs for teaching young students in the emergent literacy stage. A sidebar explains how multimedia stimulates learners. (Author/LRW)

This article focuses on practical classroom ideas for enhancing early literacy learning by teaching a broad range of metalinguistic skills. These skills include phonemic and word awareness, but focus largely on syntactic and pragmatic skills in order to give children a richer understanding of language and its functions. Theoretical background is…

Everything a persons needs to know in life is learned in Kindergarten is a popular adage among teachers. In this article, the author relates how everything she needed to know about teaching she learned from her own children. She relates that from the moment of their birth, she had determined that her four children would learn to read before they…

This study explored the development of children's early understanding of visual and orthographic aspects of print and how this is related to early reading acquisition. A total of 474 children, ages 48 to 83 months, completed standardized measures of phonological awareness and early reading skills. They also completed experimental tasks that tapped…

Teaching ability, over and above reading programs, is the major contributor to students' literacy success. Culturally and linguistically diverse students are not receiving "a free and appropriate education" when teachers are not implementing instructional strategies that optimize student achievement or positively reinforcing their cultural…

The Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg and Patterson (1996) connectionist model of reading was evaluated at two points early in its training against reading data collected from British children on two occasions during their first year of literacy instruction. First, the network's non-word reading was poor relative to word reading when compared with the…