An exploratory study investigated the relationship between perceptions and practices in reading and language arts, and examined whether teachers were using practices to develop students' literacy skills suggested in work by Marie Clay. Subjects, 16 out of a possible 22 kindergarten teachers in one southern school district, responded to a 138-item…

Three suggestions are offered to the teacher of reading: permit the students to read, encourage students to guess or predict, and focus the students' attention on meaning. (JH)

A study examined the phoneme-grapheme correspondence in native English-speaking kindergartners' spelling and compared it to the results of similar research with Spanish-speaking children. It tested the hypothesis that English-speaking children make their first grapheme-sound correspondences differently because of phonological differences in the…

This study investigated the relative ability of literate (n=24), semi-literate (n=45), and non-literate (n=21) adults to erase the initial consonant or vowel from non-words and pronounce the remaining phonemes. It was hypothesized that difficulty in removing the initial consonant from the vowel with which it coarticulates is due not only to…

A study examined the usefulness of two rules of syllabification: (1) if the first vowel or vowel digraph in a word is followed by two consonants that are not parts of a consonant digraph, the first syllable ends with the first of the two consonants, such as, nor-mal; and (2) if the first vowel or vowel digraph in a word is followed by a single…

Investigating how good and poor readers process words, a study examined the spelling and reading processes of 80 middle-class first grade students from three schools in Houston, Texas, 40 who were receiving whole word instruction, and 40 receiving phonics instruction. Based on scores from the Gates-McGinitie Reading Test, Basic R (administered in…

Part of the first book series of "Ch'al," the word workbook written in the Navajo language provides supplementary activities to the reading program. Illustrations are in reference to the 11 sound/symbol associations in the Navajo language introduced in the reader-workbook. Illustrated objects are captioned in the Navajo language using…

The student's reader-workbook accompanies the teacher's guide to "Nashdoi." Organized in the same format as the "Ch'al" and "Chaa" books, "Nashdoi" builds on the vocabulary introduced in those first two readers in the series. The reader-workbook introduces the consonant "x," 14 new vowel environments, 6 new diphthong environments, and 102 new…

This report, the summary of a series of conferences on reading research, identifies two main theories about the nature of reading: (1) reading as translation, wherein printed symbols are translated into an approximation of oral language, so that the capabilities for understanding speech can be applied to written language, and (2) reading as an…

This paper offers seven practical suggestions to teachers who are teaching phonics to hard-to-teach children (the learning disabled, the educable mentally retarded, slow learners, and the culturally disadvantaged) and who are not experiencing the success they desire. The suggestions are made under the following topics: (1) cumulative learning and…

The following papers of relevance to second language instruction are compiled here: (1) "Bilingual Math in a Monolingual Classroom: A Field Study," by Elizabeth M. Baricevic; (2) "Ideologie et pedagogie: reflexions sur le manuel de francais au programme de '3e annee secondaire' en Algerie," by Jeanne Adam; (3) "Pedagogic…

Six children from one first-grade classroom were videotaped 18 times over a seven-month period, while reading aloud complete stories. Analysis of the first 50 miscues and the last 50 miscues in both new and familiar materials read by the children yielded profiles of each child's oral reading strategies. The major findings indicated that these six…

The purpose of this study was to investigate to what extent the knowledge of letter names, letter sounds, or the combination of both facilitates the acquisition of word recognition ability. Forty-eight first graders were pretested and posttested on their knowledge of letter names and sounds, and measures of auditory and visual discrimination…

Examines the word-reading strategies of a sample of second- and third-grade students in normal classrooms, focusing on the students' relative reliance on decoding versus sight-word associations. Suggests that lack of efficient decoding skills will begin to take a toll on reading comprehension by grade 3. (SR)

Explains how to administer and score a test of early spelling ability, how to assess what the test revealed at the beginning of the school year about 26 first graders' knowledge of the function of letters in written language, and how to use that information in "natural" writing projects. (HOD)