For the last several days, Janet had been anxious about her upcoming parent-teacher conference with Sam, 18-month-old Abby's father. Sam had recently brought in alphabet flash cards because he wants Abby to learn to read. Janet completely understood Sam's desire to support his daughter's early language skills, but she was not comfortable with the…

Teachers at Orlando Day Nursery in Florida have always evaluated how well their 4-year-old prekindergartners--most of them poor and African-American--could recognize letters, isolate sounds in words, understand stories read to them, and show other hallmarks of early literacy. Just as important, though, have been the teachers' formal observations…

Purpose: Letter knowledge is a key aspect of children's language development, yet relatively little research has aimed to understand the nature of lowercase letter knowledge. We considered 4 hypotheses about children's lowercase letter knowledge simultaneously--uppercase familiarity, uppercase-lowercase similarity, own-name advantage, and…

An enhanced replication of an original quasi-experiment (Tom Bellomo, 2009b) was conducted to quantify the extent of long term retention of word parts and vocabulary. Such were introduced as part of a vocabulary acquisition strategy in a developmental reading course at one southeast four-year college. Aside from incorporating changes to the test…

Play is a significant medium for children's literacy development. As children engage in play activities, they are given opportunities and the motivation to show what they already know about reading and writing systems. Previous literature has shown that a literacy-rich environment increases the number of literacy activities available through play.…

Findings concerning the relationship of perceptual-motor and oral-language organization to later reading achievement are discussed in relation to a predictive battery of 15 tests. It was concluded that the predictive efficacy of the tests depends on the degree to which they measure integrative ability rather than on the specific skills measured.…

The extent to which individual differences in pictograph recall performance are related to reading readiness and other aspects of language and cognitive development is examined in this paper. In each of three studies kindergarten children were taught names and toy enactions for approximately 30 pictographs. The kindergarteners were then…

The paper describes the beginnings of a total developmental language learning system for mainstreamed visually impaired children in Israel. The readiness program is divided into five sections: auditory perception and discrimination, tactile perception and discrimination and fine motor coordination, gross motor coordination, body image awareness,…

Designed to explore new reading readiness predictors that are not found extensively in the more commonly used commercial group tests and to develop new indices to measure the level of reading readiness of beginning first graders, a study was undertaken involving 115 children. The factor of sex in reading readiness was also investigated. An…

The need to teach precursors to literacy as part of preschool language therapy with language-disordered children is stressed. Assessment and intervention approaches include developing the child's ability to use language in instructional contexts and facilitating language awareness (such as word and phonological consciousness). (DB)

Reading readiness activities should lead to awareness and skills that will bring a child to a point on the reading acquisition continuum where he or she will be ready to benefit from more rigorous and formally structured activities in the classroom. Children's awareness of the following five aspects of language and literacy are helpful, if not…

The development of reading and language awareness was investigated by measuring beginning letter and word knowledge in five- and six-year-old children of average ability. A letter and word reading test was constructed on the basis of a hierarchical representation of linguistic awareness of preschool children; 50 children's performance on this test…

Testing of a group of kindergarten children generally supported the hypotheses that (1) children from schools in higher socioeconomic areas would have significantly more advanced concepts of language than children in lower socioeconomic areas and (2) that this conceptual development would be correlated with more conventional measures of reading…

Discusses children's self-image and its relationship to language acquisition and reading readiness. (DD)

Reports a survey of practices in reading readiness programs and concludes that in regard to reading readiness, the close relationship between speech and reading suggests that the use of language-based programs is more promising than the use of non-language-based programs. (JM)