Reports on the development of a test of phonemic awareness suitable for administration to young children. Compares kindergarteners' performance on a measure controlling for global similarity and another measure not controlled. Finds support for the importance of controlling for global similarity when attempting to measure phoneme invariance. (RS)

Finds that kindergarten children trained in phonemic awareness significantly outperformed control children in phoneme segmentation, letter name and sound knowledge, and reading phonetically regular words and nonwords. Notes that they produced invented spellings rated developmentally superior to those of the control children. (SR)

Describes Marie Clay's word boxes that help children attend to phonological and orthographic features of words, developing phonemic awareness and improving word recognition and spelling. Describes a study showing that the use of word boxes with several elementary school students with learning disabilities was effective for improving and…

Describes an instructional activity (used with kindergarten students) called "What Can You Show Us?" which embeds phonemic awareness in quality, contextualized reading, and writing activities. (SR)

This study examined the practices of effective kindergarten programs with respect to literacy instruction so as to provide models for schools working to educate large populations of at-risk students. Three kindergarten programs participated. Research methods included observations of reading instruction and intervention programs and survey and…

The important role of phonological awareness in learning to read has become widely accepted. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of phonological processing skills when attempting to assist older low-progress readers to develop literacy skills. While researchers generally agree that the key variables in reading acquisition (letter…

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…

Current research increasingly highlights the role of early literacy in young children's development--and informs practices and policies that promote success among diverse learners. This handbook presents cutting-edge knowledge on all aspects of literacy learning in the early years. Volume 2 provides additional perspectives on important topics…

Two studies--one quasi-experimental and one randomized experiment--were designed to evaluate the effectiveness of supplemental instruction in structural analysis and oral reading practice for second- and third-grade students with below-average word reading skills. Individual instruction was provided by trained paraeducators in single- and…

Proper application of the alphabetic principle rests on an awareness of the internal phonological (and morphophonological) structure of words that the alphabet represents. Unfortunately for the would-be reader-writer, such awareness is not an automatic consequence of speaking a language, because the biological specialization for speech manages the…

Literature related to orthography, phonology, and reading is reviewed and synthesized in order to develop a rationale for a "goodness of fit" hypothesis. This hypothesis asserts that a writing system which is more consistently fit to the phonological structure of a particular language is more likely to facilitate learning to read.…

Forty kindergarten children participated in a study to determine (1) whether significant relationships existed among children's scores on various word boundary tasks, (2) whether scores on the individual tasks were significantly related to the children's ability to represent phonemic segments in their spelling, and (3) whether different…

To determine the degree of emphasis on phonics instruction necessary for beginning readers, a study was conducted involving five pairs of four-year-old monozygotic twins. Randomly selected twins from each pair were exposed to two different levels of phonics instruction. In one group, the reduced treatment group, only one sound equivalent per…

A 40-item nonsense word list was administered to 27 first-graders who had been taught letter-sound correspondences in isolation. The results displayed a succession of stages through which subjects apparently passed. At the second stage, subjects could sound letters but not blend the sounds into words; at the third stage, subjects could sound some…

This paper analyzes evidence related to the effectiveness of vowel generalization from two viewpoints: the nature of letter-sound and sound-letter relationships as derived from Dewey, Hanna, and Hillerich, and the nature of these relationships as derived from results of teaching vowel generalizations to children. From the evidence and the research…