A study used the "Emergent Reading Ability Judgments for Favorite Storybooks" (ERAJFS) scale to provide an informative description of children's emergent reading behaviors during a school year. Subjects, children ranging in age from two and one half years to five years who were enrolled in a day care center classroom, took part in two…

Given preschool children's characteristically short attention spans and unpredictable interests, teachers can encourage early reading most effectively and appropriately through the systemization of informal or incidental, rather than formal, learning. They can make learning to read relevant to traditional preschool activities in a number of ways.…

When used diagnostically at the readiness level, language-experience becomes an effective way to meet individual differences and to differentiate instruction in a group setting. For a 5- or 6-year old, school should be an exciting, happy, purposeful place, and language-experience lends itself well to such a setting. The first steps are to…

A study examined what parents of preschool children (infancy through age five) do to help their children get ready for a formal reading program, such as how often parents carried out prereading activities and how the activities compared with those generally suggested by early childhood education experts. Surveys completed by 157 parents indicated…

Useful for teachers and parents of children who are developmentally ready for a beginning reading program, this guide is intended to help plan activities differentiated according to children's readiness for reading and individualized according to their strengths and needs. The guide is also helpful for young children who are either early readers…

A comparative analysis evaluated three studies that dealt with the differences among five-year-olds that should be considered before reading instruction is initiated in kindergarten. The premise of the comparison was that children from different countries (especially Israel, where these studies were conducted), have different abilities, react…

Twenty-nine kindergarten children judged to have weak or inadequate psychomotor abilities affecting their acquisition of written language participated in a psychomotor training program. The program used rhythmic, optic, phonemic, kinesthetic, and melodic exercises to attempt to facilitate the children's language acquisition and thus to improve…

Research studies have attributed the reading failure of children from low socioeconomic groups to factors such as hunger, poor physical health, substandard living conditions, and the language mismatch that results from the difference between spoken nonstandard dialect and printed standard English. While each of these does influence reading…

Reading requires the synthesis of auditory and visual skills and therefore involves almost all of the brain. Stages of reading include prereading skills (requiring an adequate spoken vocabulary), the ability to name letters and pictures, good memory for spoken sentences, and manual dexterity in copying patterns. Learning to read involves the…

A total of 211 kindergarten children, aged 63 to 81 months, were classified into two groups according to the risk of failure in first grade predicted for them on the basis of their performance on the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) and the Draw a Person (DAP) test. According to prediction, Group I children without intervention would probably…

Some children become capable readers and writers before ever attending school and without exposure to formal instruction. This phenomenon--sometimes referred to as natural literacy development--is not, in the strictest sense, natural; as the adult presents much of the literacy environment to the child in a socialized, mediated form, teaching is…

A study demonstrated that young children who have difficulty with phonics can be taught to read through other methods, that phonics is only one of the many useful strategies that a child can employ, and that many contextual strategies are easier to learn and more reliable than phonics. A case study was conducted during an intervention with a young…

A nationwide survey was conducted to determine what skills and knowledge kindergarten teachers consider important for preschoolers to have upon entering kindergarten. A sample of 400 randomly selected school districts were invited to contribute kindergarten readiness guidelines and report cards; 78 schools and school districts from the United…

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…

In learning to read a nonnative language, the learner's ability to achieve meaning is hampered if adequate preparation or readiness for reading is neglected. A review of the literature pertaining to second language learning and reading in a second language has identified five principles that appear to be significant in providing effective reading…