Describes the development of an instructional model for training preschool/daycare/kindergarten staff in the area of reading readiness. Concludes that the model was effective. (FL)

Tests the statement in "Becoming a Nation of Readers" that kindergartners can name an average of 14 letters. Finds that a more realistic distribution is bi-modal in that most kindergartners know 8 or fewer letters, and only a few can name more than 20 letters. (RS)

Parents are not recommended to teach their preschoolers to read. Although some children learn to read before school, forcing a child to read can have many damaging effects. Instead, parents are encouraged to talk to their child, to develop important reading readiness skills in their child, and to build their child's background of experiences. (TM)

Unproven beliefs about the process of reading and its instruction and about the effects of maturation and social structure on learning have obscured the question of what children know about how to read. An alternate conceptualization proposes that to learn to read children must obtain experience in three reading contexts: the use of print and its…

FOUR STUDIES CONDUCTED BY THE MOUNT VERNON PUBLIC SCHOOLS OVER A PERIOD OF FIVE SEMESTERS INVOLVED MACHINE-TEACHING READING TO 240 DISADVANTAGED PREKINDERGARTEN CHILDREN FROM THE CHILDREN'S CENTER AND THE CHILD DEVELOPMENT CENTER TO PREPARE THEM FOR MORE SUCCESSFUL KINDERGARTEN LEARNING THROUGH ACADEMICALLY-ORIENTED READINESS ACTIVITIES IN AN…

This book has been written to help parents, or any other nonprofessional reading teachers, teach preschoolers about reading. Part one discusses the psychological, philosophical, and historical aspects of home teaching. Part two presents the practical aspects of home teaching, specifically the things a parent can do to prepare a child to read and a…

This paper discusses the place of reading instruction in the education of brain-injured children and presents some arguments for early reading instruction for children in general. Reading instruction is especially suitable for brain-injured children because reading presents an additional means of stimulating the brain. Meaning is attached to…

Explores how children become oriented to literacy and how their perceptions of the purpose of print develop as they move toward becoming more fluent users of print. (DF)

Study results do not demonstrate that early reading is made possible by precocity in speech-sound segmentation, blending, or discrimination ability, but that the complex skill involving the manipulation of sounds in temporal order may be more closely related to early reading ability. (AEA)

The development of four-year-old children's knowledge of letters and printed words was studied to determine if preschool children begin reading, and if so, how. A natural hierarchy of knowledge was noted. (MKM)

Discusses a study designed to determine whether early reading instruction constitutes a positive factor in the cognitive development of children. The subjects for this study were 25 children in a nursery school in Macerata, Italy. (CFM)

This research review concludes that precocious reading ability is a complex skill, and levels of specific subskills vary widely among individuals. Precocious reading ability is moderately associated with general intelligence and with academic achievement. Parents may encourage the early development of reading through natural and mutually enjoyable…

The authors of this article report on a preliminary study of 18, 4- and 5-year-old children, followed by a longitudinal study of 44 children, who were tested in the first, second, and third grades. The children's ability to detect the ambiguity of lexically ambiguous sentences (e. g., "The children saw the bat lying by the fence") and…

A study investigated the kinds of questions children ask as they encounter written language. Data were gathered over a 7-month period for two boys, one approximately 4, the other approximately 2 years of age. Two types of observation sessions were used: formal story reading times that were audiorecorded, and informal situations where the…

This study sought to determine whether it is possible to predict at the end of kindergarten those pupils who will not succeed in achieving stipulated norms for reading in the first grade, and if a summer intervention program could contravert predicted reading failure. Failure was identified as a score below the 25th percentile on the Stanford…