A group of 30 nonreading kindergarten children who received 7 weeks of instruction in phoneme segmentation and letter names/sounds were assessed on segmentation and reading measures. They outperformed a language activities group, which received instruction in letter names/sounds and additional language activities, and a group receiving no…

Argues that learning how to read in an alphabetic system requires children to understand the complex relationship between print and speech. Suggests that prereading and beginning reading instruction should be designed to facilitate the acquisition of phonemic awareness. Recommends specific practices for reading instruction. (RS)

Provides convergent evidence of a developmental sequence in kindergartners' emerging knowledge of word: beginning consonant knowledge facilitates a child's concept of word in text, which in turn facilitates phoneme segmentation, which in turn facilitates word recognition. (SR)

Discusses two questions concerning entering first graders' abilities in language awareness: what are the connections from skills knowledge to beginning reading for these children; and what additional skills or experiences are needed that will help these children move toward reading on their own? (NH)

Reviews research on the question of how to best teach letter-sound correspondences in beginning reading instruction. Describes a new, child-friendly, research-based way of teaching letter-sound correspondences to English- and Spanish-speaking children, which is not only explicit, systematic, and extensive, but also context embedded and meaningful.…

Two experiments replicated an earlier study on the causal connection between rhyming skills and reading development found in English. Different results were found from the first study. Argues that methodological and instructional factors may be very important for the conceptual interpretation of studies attempting to pit small units (phonemes)…

Replicates a study of a "common unit" task which includes modifications to the original procedure. Confirms the pattern observed in the original study: beginning readers learning by a mixed method can identify shared phonemes but not shared rimes in the common unit task. Discusses implications. (RS)

Discusses the implications of Goswami and Bryant's (1990) theory about important causal connections in reading for classroom teaching, and reviews more recent "rhyme and analogy" research within this framework. Discusses new research on the nature of the English spelling system and the representation of linguistic knowledge. Emphasizes the…

Examines factors accounting for early reading performance in Finnish, a transparent orthography with a clear mapping of phonemes onto graphemes. Notes that measures for grades one and four included reading comprehension, phoneme awareness, and object- and digit naming. Suggests a larger role for phoneme awareness for children learning a…

From a 9,000-word lexicon, a set of spelling-to-sound correspondences was developed to systematically organize possible content for beginning reading instruction. With the aid of computer sorting procedures, correspondences and correspondence exemplars were sequenced according to criteria of productivity, regularity, generalizability, and…

This experiment was an attempt to replicate a sound discrimination training procedure reported by Elkonin (1963). Eight kindergarten subjects were given a training list composed of five words made up of nine sounds. Experimental subjects learned to discriminate the sounds making up the words with aid of pictures representing the words as well as…

Descriptive statistics of grapheme patterns to which child readers are initially exposed were determined, with the purpose of providing a data source for research on children's knowledge and use of orthographic structures in reading and spelling English. (DF)

Blending means smoothing together subword segments to try to identify a spoken word. Research suggests that beginning readers need to blend to combine the phonemes they "sound out" into a recognizable approximation of a known word. Popular wisdom presumes blending is easiest when the segments of words are whispered and when syllables are…

Discusses the effectiveness of two techniques of teaching vowel knowledge--the vowel-in-isolation approach and the phonogram approach. (FL)

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)