Teaching students the most frequent sounds of the alphabet letters is the first crucial step in good phonics instruction. But beginning letter and sound lessons, especially if poorly taught or too rapidly paced, can be overwhelming and confusing for some young children and struggling readers. How can we simplify the cognitive task for such…

The purpose of this study was to illustrate the use of Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM) to investigate the effects of school and children's attributes on children' reading achievement. In particular, this study was designed to: (1) develop the HLM models to determine the effects of school-level and child-level variables on children's reading…

Childhood is the crucial period for early children's reading ability building. Former research (Hanson & Farrell, 1995) found that early reading experience had a positive and long-term effect on reading competence for high school seniors in the future. Therefore, it is of great importance for researchers to understand children's initial reading…

This is a description of the evaluation of Reading Recovery (RR). RR is an early reading intervention serving about 125,000 children every year in about 8,000 U.S. schools. Its 15,000 teachers submit data on every child to the National Data Evaluation Center, which produces a report for each school, district and university involved with RR.…

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…

In contrast to a common set of roles or definitions, it is a common sense of mission that unifies practitioners in the field of early childhood education. Successful missions in time become transformed into organizational sagas that capture the allegiance and commitment of a group. Early childhood educators can increase their commitment to the…

Japanese preschool children begin to read at home at age four without any formal instruction or reading readiness programs, and the development of their reading abilities in the preschool stage is mainly up to the parents. A new reading program will be needed for the sake of children with parents who are not sufficiently concerned about reading.…

This paper discusses some of the issues in early reading instruction to be presented at Institute X. The issues discussed include sight word lists for beginning readers, choosing instructional methods in reading that complement individuals' learning styles, a pragmatic approach to teaching reading comprehension, literal reading comprehension, the…

During the spring of 1971, a study was made of early reading responses of four, five, and six year olds in a Finnish preschool in order to discover clues to the onset of reading when beginning reading instruction focuses on a phonetic approach and when the language (Finnish) has a highly phonetic regularity. Sixty-two children were tested,…

There are at least two kinds of phonetic knowledge: phoneme synthesis and analytic knowledge. In phoneme synthesis a person demonstrates phonetic knowledge by being able to assemble segments into larger units. With analytic knowledge one knows that syllables or words are analyzable into constituent segments. One type of knowledge enables learning…

To identify the profile of the active older reader, indepth taped interviews were conducted with 23 retired individuals for whom reading was an important part of daily living experience. Demographic data indicated that the highest education level attained varied from grammar school to a master's degree. Developmentally, the lifetime reader…

Most reading methods courses do not provide many experiences in children's literature. Because teachers have experienced an elementary school setting in which free reading was discouraged, and because teachers teach as they were taught, this trend continues. The need for a second reading course at the undergraduate level is clearly apparent.…

Describes ways that both parents and teachers can instill a love of reading in children. (FL)

A 9-month naturalistic study of 16 preschoolers' classroom literacy behaviors and a related study of one student's literacy activities at home examined book-related dramatic play as an important part of the children's literacy interactions. Analyses of instances where play was related to the meanings of the books the children had read indicated…

The relationship of concrete operations to beginning reading was investigated with three samples of early readers and prereaders: prekindergarten and kindergarten children who were early readers and those who were not yet reading. Piagetian tasks on conservation of number, conservation of quantity, seriation, multiple classification, and class…