The goal of the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide, "Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade," is to offer educators specific, evidence-based recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. The guide suggests…

Explores the characteristics and implications of the "new sentence method" of learning to read. (JM)

In this study, we explored the relationship between beginning readers' phonological awareness and other aspects of phonological processing, specifically as manifested in short-term memory and comprehension tasks. The theoretical questions underlying the study were (a) what roles phonological processes play in children's beginning reading, from…

The use of Single Concept Cards and Single Concept Card Sentences is presented as a means of helping poor readers or nonreaders improve word recognition. An overview describes the cards, and strategies are offered for teaching the first word or sentence, teaching subsequent words or sentences, and providing reinforcement. (JDD)

Results of a study in which first graders learned ten unfamiliar function words in two different formats indicated that sentence readers learned more about the syntactic and semantic identities of function words, whereas list readers remembered their orthographic identities better and could pronounce the words faster and more accurately in…

In recent years, much has been written about effective beginning reading instruction. Most professionals agree that early literacy instruction should include (a) phonemic awareness activities; (b) instruction in letter-sound relationships; (c) instruction in sounding out words and recognizing simple high frequency words at sight, (d) reading…

This study reveals that children from the age of four to six years are unable to segment meaningful sentences into component words. The experiment investigated three hypotheses of performance on a word-learning task for beginning readers and prereaders. Readers and prereaders were taught five words as oral responses, each word paired with a…

The third edition of a text originally written by Tinker in 1952 and revised with McCullough in 1962 presents an overview of the nature and goals of reading, of the bases for and factors related to reading programs, and of the practices recommended for reading instruction. In this edition greater attention is given to cognitive and linguistic…

The development of children's metalinguistic understanding of the basic unit of reading--the word--was examined. Subjects were 45 children from preschool, kindergarten, and first grade who were reclassified according to reading ability (nonreadiness, readiness, reader). The children's understanding of the word as a linguistic segment was measured…