FOUR NULL HYPOTHESES WERE TESTED TO EVALUATE SELECTED READING READINESS TESTS AS PREDICTORS OF FIRST-GRADE READING ACHIEVEMENT. FIVE SCHOOLS IN THE BANGOR, MAINE, CITY SCHOOL SYSTEM WERE RANDOMLY CHOSEN. IN EACH SCHOOL, ONE CLASS USED THE EXPERIMENTAL PROGRAM WHICH EMPHASIZED SUPPLEMENTARY VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION WITH READINESS TRAINING. ANOTHER…

This study identifies high-frequency words in the spontaneous vocabulary of 125 first grade children, and suggests ways to use the word list in teaching beginning readers. (CM)

The criteria of 75 percent utility for phonetic rules to be used in reading instruction may be based on faulty logic. Once children achieve approximate pronunciation by applying phonetic rules, they usually can infer proper pronunciation. This supports teaching children to find and pronounce little words in larger unknown words. (MCK)

The extent to which intralist similarity affects kindergarten pupils' rate of acquisition, word recognition skills, and tendency to generalize responses to similar words was investigated. The subjects were 54 children from a semirural elementary school who had had no formal training in letter recognition. Three acquisition lists were used to…

A well-organized set of phonics rules will enable the reader to identify many words which are in his vocabulary, but which he has not encountered before in print. The rules must be sequenced in a manner that capitalizes on their applicability to the vocabulary of the typical reader. This can be achieved only when the rule set is defined on a…

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…

This textbook is intended as supplementary material for children who need a K-4 interest-level and K-2 skill-level reader in either English or Spanish. The basic vocabulary is common to five of the seven most widely used basic English primers. A special feature of this reader is the introduction of new words in both languages. The color coding is…

Beginning reading instruction is a challenge that teachers can meet successfully by using imagination, working hard, displaying enthusiasm, and expressing genuine concern for the young children that they teach. This paper offers guidelines for beginning reading teachers who base their programs on traditional basal readers. The guidelines are…

To determine if children who have been taught to read using the i.t.a. would write stories with a vocabulary more nearly approaching the variety and extent of their oral vocabulary than would children who had been taught traditional orthography (T.O.), comparisons were made between 82 experimental (i.t.a.) and 80 control (T.O.) subjects matched on…

A study examined th phonics instruction that five basal reader series provide from kindergarten through grade six. The five basal programs (designated as Series A through E) that were examined are both similar and dissimilar in the recommendations they make for phonics. One series covers as many as 129 letter-sound correspondences; another covers…

When follow-through kindergarten and first-grade pupils in four school systems across the United States were encouraged to pick their own key vocabulary words as recommended by the Sylvia Ashton-Warner method and to apply the words to the language experience method of learning reading, the lists the children requested differed significantly from…

Universal trends and individual variations in the language development process of the child are described and their relationships to beginning reading instruction are discussed. Child language begins with single word utterances to name things or to express needs and feelings. With a two-word utterance, the child can describe relationships more…

The study investigated the effectiveness of an ecological inventory and screen writing for the acquisition of reading words for secondary-aged moderately mentally handicapped students. The study utilized an ecological inventory model which is an adult-referenced curriculum based on adult tasks and local resources and environments, rather than on…

This article describes how content area readers/informational books can be used in beginning reading programs to support both literacy development and the learning of national standards-based content. Benefits from using content area readers/informational books with young readers include: (1) Certain children, often boys, are far more excited by…

Three students (ages 17, 19, and 21) with moderate disabilities were taught to read and match-to-sample sight words comprising 4 4-member stimulus sets. Student performance indicated that symmetric relations emerged before one-node transitive relations and that one-node transitive relations emerged before two-node transitive relations. Results…