Nursery rhymes and written phonics used in a meaningful context are valuable teaching methods which can be applied in a whole language classroom or in conjunction with a basal reading program. Because nursery rhymes are rooted in oral tradition they lend themselves to oral presentation. They provide forms for the oral beginnings of the best of…

The rationale, development, and implementation of a reading program designed to teach disadvantaged children the skills prerequisite to learning to read are discussed in this paper. Of particular importance are skills in the recognition and manipulation of basic speech sounds, phonemes. The first of the program's three parts takes two and one-half…

The irregularity of English spelling rules, dialect differences, and an inability to identify sound segments within a single syllable are three important reasons teachers and students have difficulty teaching and learning reading using phonics. Within the same language, phonics rules may need to be adapted to fit the dialect of the student or of…

Instruction for beginning readers is thought to be needed on several fronts, including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. The National Reading Panel reviewed the findings of many experiments to determine whether there was sufficient scientific evidence to indicate the effectiveness of these forms of…

Since the phonic abilities of high school shorthand teachers and students affect the students' mastery of dictation and transcription, a study was conducted (1) to develop a dictation/transcription learning cycle depicting the phoneme/grapheme correspondence in the two processes; (2) to determine the phonetic patterns of correspondence of the…

This report describes a program for increasing phonemic awareness in the primary grades. The targeted population consisted of first and second grade students from middle class communities located in the Midwest. Research indicated that students who enter primary grades without phonemic awareness might have reading difficulties. Lack of phonemic…

A model service learning course for elementary teaching credential candidates is described. Preservice teachers taking a required university reading methods course studied scientifically-based reading instruction and volunteered in Los Angeles Unified School District classrooms during reading instruction time. Service learning experiences were…

Forty kindergarten children participated in a study to determine (1) whether significant relationships existed among children's scores on various word boundary tasks, (2) whether scores on the individual tasks were significantly related to the children's ability to represent phonemic segments in their spelling, and (3) whether different…

A teaching technique that leads to auditory conceptualization--the ability to determine the number and order of sounds embedded within syllables--shows promise of measurably improving the reading proficiency of children of all ability levels. Based on C. and P. Lindamood's published technique, "Auditory Discrimination in Depth," the…

A 40-item nonsense word list was administered to 27 first-graders who had been taught letter-sound correspondences in isolation. The results displayed a succession of stages through which subjects apparently passed. At the second stage, subjects could sound letters but not blend the sounds into words; at the third stage, subjects could sound some…

In the context of whole language learning, the teaching of phonics can be approached in two different ways. In one situation, the teacher engages children in composing with a purpose and for an audience, during which time the children become aware of graphophonic relationships through their need to spell words. In the other situation, the teacher…

Cognitive psychology has provided an information processing model that distinguishes between input processes such as listening to speech or reading and output processes such as speaking or writing. It is useful for spelling reformers to consider reading (input) and writing (output) processes separately, because the demands of the reader and of the…

Ninety-three first grade children participated in a study that examined the relationship among instructional materials, other factors such as test scores, and the growth and application of letter-sound correspondence knowledge. The study also sought to determine the importance of letter-sound correspondence knowledge in the acquisition and…

This study focuses on the relationship between blending ability and reading comprehension among 80 prereading children from three private preschools. Three methods of instruction were tested: One group was instructed with an auditory method; the second group was instructed with an auditory-visual method; and the third group practiced the basic set…

It is upon a positive literature-based foundation that educators must build excellent curriculum and teaching strategies. It is the job of educators to be trained to integrate the concepts of whole language and direct phonetic instruction so children have the advantage of both schools of thought, to be aware of how children learn most efficiently,…