Background: Failure to learn early reading skills leads to lower reading comprehension later in elementary school (Double et al., 2019; Paige et al., 2019), which can then lead to poverty, underemployment, and increased likelihood of being incarcerated (World Literacy Foundation, 2018). Early reading skills are best developed in kindergarten…

Teaching and learning literacy in the early years can be a joyful, explorative and meaningful experience. This accessible book will give teachers and practitioners the practical and theoretical skills and knowledge they require to successfully and confidently teach reading, writing and oral skills in the early years classroom. Foregrounding the…

This paper reports findings from a large-scale evaluation undertaken to explore the impact of the "linguistic phonics approach" (LPA) on young children's reading. The LPA is a systematic and applied programme that differs from traditional phonics programmes. For example, rather than ask children to look at letters and speculate on the…

Designed as a practical guide for teachers, this book briefly reviews and discusses various aspects of phonics. Phonics is defined, and the part phonics has played in the teaching of reading in the past is considered. The use of phonics in teaching reading at the present is examined in relation to currently available research on various approaches…

Most educators agree that an approach balanced between phonics and whole language is the best method of teaching beginning readers. Marie Carbo (1996) discusses the importance of focusing on a balanced approach to reading, because different students have different learning styles. Children who learn best with phonics instruction have analytic and…

This paper reports the consistency of phonic generalization employing two kinds of frequency determined from a corpus of the 18,000 most frequently occurring words in the English language. Twenty-two commonly taught phonic generalizations were analyzed using a computer. It was concluded that consistency alone is not a sufficient criterion on which…

Provides a look at primary grade children's abilities, inabilities, and requirements to use phonics as a beginning reading strategy and suggests a model that facilitates children's application of phonics while reading. (FL)

This discussion on spelling and phonics focuses on beginning reading vocabulary (phonology and graphemics of high utility words), factors in word perception (their recognition in teaching word perception skills), premises and principles of phonics (their relation to curriculum content and to methods), phonic rules or spelling patterns (their…

This paper details the development of two commercial programs for the instruction of language skills. The first, a reading program for the first two months of first grade, is designed to move children from speaking to reading without experiencing failure. In teaching prereading phonics skills (letter recognition, letter writing, awareness of…

Discusses the steps involved in and the preparation necessary for learning to read (decode) and to comprehend what is read. (JM)

How linguistic principles can be incorporated into reading instruction was shown by examining the interrelationships of certain linguistics ideas to learning to read. First, the acquisition of oral language was discussed as to the developmental stages: phonological, morphological-lexical, and syntactic. It was suggested that reading instruction…

A great deal of time could be saved in all grades and for all content areas if a truly phonic alphabet were developed. This alphabet would have only one symbol for each sound and only one sound for each symbol so that beginning readers could learn to pronounce any word they could see and spell any word they could pronounce correctly. Such an…

Argues there is ample evidence of the prime significance and hierarchical character of the print medium, and of an absolute need for individual letter recognition from the outset of instruction. Discusses the role of the alphabet and its relationship to its precursor speech sounds for the developing learner. (RS)