The current study developed a taxonomy of reading skills and compared this taxonomy with skills being trained in 30 commercially available software programs designed to teach emergent literacy or literacy-specific skills for children in preschool, kindergarten, and Grade 1. Outcomes suggest that, although some skills are being trained in a…

Examines the importance of consistency of letter-sound patterns in beginning reading instruction. (HOD)

Effects of instruction in phonemic awareness during preschool and/or kindergarten on the metalinguistic development and subsequent reading achievement of young children with disabilities were investigated in this project. The main focus of study combined a longitudinal and experimental design in which 79 preschool children with disabilities…

This study, which extends Jeffrey and Samuels' study, indicates that children taught "sounds" learned more grapheme-phoneme correspondences and read more transfer words than did those taught "words." (HOD)

Examines whether letter-name knowledge facilitates learning spellings in which the names of one or more letters can be heard in the pronunciation of the words. Results suggest preschool Portuguese children who know the names of the letters can learn to read by processing letter-sound relations in words; however, children may not use this mechanism…

The effects of phonic blend training on word decoding were compared in two groups of 4-year-old children, one that was proficient at segmenting syllables into individual phonemes in terms of the Fox-Routh test and another group that did not have this proficiency. (BJG)

This study examined the interrelations of speech skills and letter knowledge to the phonological awareness and early reading skills of 99 preschool children. Findings indicated that phoneme awareness, but not rhyme awareness, correlated with early reading measures and that phoneme manipulation was closely associated with letter knowledge and with…

This article presents 20 activities to promote phonemic awareness in students, including teaching nursery rhymes, playing the "I Spy" game using initial sounds of words, creating a sound box, having students sort picture cards based on initial sounds, playing phoneme deletion games, and having students clap and count syllables. (Contains 4…

Using a forced-choice matching-to-sample procedure five factors were varied: position of phoneme; contrast between words; type of phoneme; redundant visual cue; and allophonic variation. Performance improved significantly after four days of training for all but allophonic variation. Redundant visual cue greatly improved performance during training…

For children from low-resource backgrounds, a literacy-rich preschool experience with a skilled and engaged teacher can offset risk factors and lay the groundwork for lifelong academic success. Now schools can ensure effective early literacy instruction with this field-tested, research-based curriculum for children 3 to 5 years of age. These 41…

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…

Study results do not demonstrate that early reading is made possible by precocity in speech-sound segmentation, blending, or discrimination ability, but that the complex skill involving the manipulation of sounds in temporal order may be more closely related to early reading ability. (AEA)

Two blending strategies for decoding words (pausing and not pausing between successive sounds) were compared with nine preschool children. Once mastered, segmenting by not pausing engendered high and sustained levels of word identification. Other findings indicated that sound identification abilities were necessary but not sufficient for decoding.…

Reports on a study of Grade 5 children who had been trained in phoneme identity six years earlier. Results reveal that these children were superior to untrained controls on irregular word reading and on a composite list of nonwords, regular words, and irregular words. Preschool instruction in phonemic structure had modest but detectable effects on…

Finds that a combination of high letter-sound knowledge and print feedback facilitated awareness of phonemes among nonreaders, but awareness of rhymes was not facilitated by high letter-sound knowledge or print feedback. Suggests that the definition of literacy used with bidirectional, causal models of phonological awareness be expanded. (RS)