In the 1920s and 1930s, interpretations of reading readiness held that learning to read occurred at a specific point in cognitive development. Postponement of reading instruction until a child reached this stage of maturity was widely accepted at that time, and throughout the 1940s and 1950s. The 1960s marked a transition period in terms of…

The instruction provided by two beginning reading programs (the Ginn 720 and the Palo Alto 1973 reading programs) are analyzed and compared in this paper on the basis of such factors as phoneme-grapheme correspondence and phonics instruction, sight word learning, and the development of reading comprehension. The comparison focuses primarily on the…

As part of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, a screening test was designed to aid in the selection of the four kindergarten children who were to participate in the project. Consisting of seven parts, the test asked each child to do the following tasks: write his/her name; isolate…

Examined phonemic awareness and pseudoword decoding in kindergarten and first grade Arabic native children. Hypothesized that because Arabic speakers learn to read in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)--a language structurally distinct from the local form of the language they grow up speaking--linguistic differences between the two varieties would…

Preliminary results from data on 146 Australian, 284 American, and 70 Norwegian preschool twins indicate reliable genetic influences on phonological awareness and memory and learning. Vocabulary, grammar, and morphology showed significant shared environment and negligible genetic effects. A print knowledge composite showed genetic and shared…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether music instruction was related to significant gains in the development of young children's phonemic awareness, particularly in their phoneme-segmentation fluency. Beginning in January 2004 and continuing through the end of April 2004, each of four intact classrooms of kindergarten children (n =…

A preliminary study sought to determine whether preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade children's analyses of English words were governed by perception of onsets and rimes or by perception of phonemes within onsets and rimes. Data were from several previous studies that used a 10-word invented spelling task. High percentages of the 135…

This study examined the reading progress under different teaching approaches of 89 children with diagnosed learning disabilities. The learning-disabled children were placed either in an experimental group that received reading instruction with materials that sequenced learning in increasingly complex levels (from letter-sound to word to context…

Intended to discourage classroom reading teachers from relying on "phonics instruction" as a remedy for students' inadequate reading performance, this pamphlet presents reasons why phonics drills should not be taught at all in the classroom and offers a set of practical phonic awareness activities to help poor readers overcome reading…

Twenty first grade children were videotaped during their first six weeks of learning to read in a study of the modified synthetic phonics program and the four progressive stages of oral reading behavior (emergence, contextual, nonresponse, and postresponse). The approach used by the teacher emphasized learning new words through the concurrent…

Examines the development of word recognition skills of 80 school children (grades two-four). Good beginning readers rapidly learn to recognize high frequency words from visual input alone and simultaneously expand and consolidate spelling sound correspondences. Younger and poor readers rely more on phonological information in word decoding.…

Twenty-four first-graders who were taught reading skills using the "Language Basics: Elementary" program, which incorporates the Orton-Gillingham-based Alphabetic Phonics Method, made statistically significant gains in phonological awareness, decoding, and reading comprehension. Thirty-two controls taught with the Houghton-Mifflin Basal…

This What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) topic report addresses reading interventions for students in grades K-3, including core reading curricula, programs, or products to be used as supplements to other reading instruction, programs that focus on staff development, and literacy software. The WWC review on beginning reading focuses on programs…

The performance of 68 preschool children, ages three (28), four (21), and five (19), on selected phoneme-grapheme correspondence tasks was analyzed for age and sex differences in two stages of data collection. First, the children spelled their first names and the initial of their last names with letters on a magnetic board, after which they…

The articles in this publication are (1) "The Children's Literary Heritage" by Dora V. Smith; (2) "Some Approaches to Teaching Standard English as a Second Language" by Charlotte K. Brooks; (3) "Detroit Great Cities School Improvement Program in Language Arts" by Clarence W. Wachner; (4) "Teaching and Testing Critical Listening in the Fifth and…