To make sense of unknown words encountered in their reading, children must relate what they read to their prior knowledge. It is important to use children's language in early reading instruction, through the use of language experience stories that provide children with a natural transition from oral to written language. Nursery rhymes may also be…

This study examined the development of metaprocessing abilities in children with varying degrees of language abilities and sought to determine if the patterns of metaprocessing development that emerged were similar for these ability groups. Subjects were 141 children ages 4-5 at the beginning of the study, divided into a control group, a low…

A study was conducted to shed light on the influence which children's developmental stage in learning to read and the reading instruction they receive have on first-graders' reading concepts. The study provided descriptive information to answer the following questions: (1) Do children from literature-based and skill-based instructional settings…

The dependence of reading on speech is based on three assumptions: speech is the primary language system, acquired naturally without direct instruction; alphabetic writing systems are more or less phonetic representations of oral language; and speech appears to be an essential foundation for the acquisition of reading ability. By presupposing…

The instruction provided by two beginning reading programs (the Ginn 720 and the Palo Alto 1973 reading programs) are analyzed and compared in this paper on the basis of such factors as phoneme-grapheme correspondence and phonics instruction, sight word learning, and the development of reading comprehension. The comparison focuses primarily on the…

A study was conducted into the operation of an interactive-compensatory model of reading. Specifically, it examined the development of context-free word recognition skills, their role in contextual reading, and the degree to which one word recognition skill might compensate another. Four word factors were examined: (1) orthographic redundancy (the…

Very sharp discrimination functions for the timing of voice onset relative to stop release characterize perceptual boundaries between certain pairs of stop consonants for adult speakers of many languages. To explore how these discriminations depend on experience, their development was studied among Kikuyu children, whose native language contains…

This study examined the reading progress under different teaching approaches of 89 children with diagnosed learning disabilities. The learning-disabled children were placed either in an experimental group that received reading instruction with materials that sequenced learning in increasingly complex levels (from letter-sound to word to context…

The comparatively small vowel inventory of Bantu languages leads young Bantu learners to produce "undifferentiations," so that, for example, the spoken forms of "hat,""hut,""heart" and "hurt" sound the same to a British ear. The two criteria for a non-native speaker's spoken performance are…

The most significant criterion for classifying spelling errors is whether the erroneous form yields the same pronunciation as the intended word. Five categories can be discerned: (1) non-identical pronunciation, non-existent English word; (2) non-identical pronunciation, confusion of existing words; (3) identical pronunciation, English spelling…

A study examined (1) the relative contributions of skill in name retrieval and alphabetic mapping to the acquisition of skill in word identification, (2) the differential aspects of deficiencies in each of these processes on word identification, and (3) the differential effects of name familiarization and training in phonemic segmentation and…

Twenty first grade children were videotaped during their first six weeks of learning to read in a study of the modified synthetic phonics program and the four progressive stages of oral reading behavior (emergence, contextual, nonresponse, and postresponse). The approach used by the teacher emphasized learning new words through the concurrent…

Described are areas of speech and language which the speech pathologist must evaluate in the preschool screening process. Phonemic development, morphological development, syntax, and semantic development are discussed in terms of normal developmental stages and methods of evaluation. (LS)

Procedures for five English-as-a-Second-Language dictation exercises designed to enhance students' ability to self-correct are described, and suggested texts are presented. The self-correcting dictations allow students to practice their listening, gain instant feedback, and have practical information in hard form quickly. They also reduce the…

Item response data were obtained from large samples of students in Grades K-community college, taking the following tests: Stanford Early School Achievement Test, Stanford Achievement Test, Stanford Test of Academic Skills, Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test, and Stanford Diagnostic Mathematical Test. Data were classified as fitting or non-fitting…