This article: (1) profiles kindergarten policies and practices currently implemented in district schools; (2) analyzes the research supporting the major policy alternatives for six common kindergarten and school entry age issues that all school districts must address; and (3) identifies the optimum policy option alternative for each issue based on…

A study demonstrated the viability of an instructional paradigm that identifies adult mediation within the zone of proximal development to be a significant factor in young children's learning. Six teachers participated during the first year and eight teachers during the second year. Complete data were collected for 200 kindergarten children.…

A study was conducted to determine the current trends in reading materials and methods used to teach first grade students to read in the Northern Valley Region of Bergen County, New Jersey. Twenty-one first grade teachers responded to a survey which consisted of open-ended questions asking about goals and incentives, multiple choice questions on…

The paper describes the Writing to Read instructional system and its implementation in five Albuquerque (New Mexico) public schools with kindergarten, first grade, and special education students. The Writing to Read System is a multisensory, multimedia literacy program and involves five types of materials: a computer-based instructional program;…

To better understand the early stages of literacy, a study investigated how young children learn about the registers of the written story genre. Subjects, 47 kindergraten children, were individually read to and then asked to "pretend-read" one or two selected picture storybooks on three consecutive days; their readings were audiotaped…

A research project was undertaken to explore the effects of using a microcomputer equipped with a speech synthesizer to enhance and aid in the individualization of the language experience approach in beginning reading instruction. A prototypic program was developed and pilot-tested with 12 kindergarten children over a three-week period, with each…

To examine the effects of the language experience approach (LEA) on beginning reading achievement, a study analyzed five projects conducted as part of the United States Office of Education first grade studies and 32 additional studies comparing basal reading approaches to LEA. Using two methods of quantitative synthesis (vote-counting and…

Research suggests that reading is a written language process that is learned naturally in much the same way as oral language. To test this hypothesis, a descriptive, longitudinal study was conducted of the reading development of eight kindergarten and first grade students who showed environmental print awareness but were not considered readers.…

The IBM Writing to Read program for children in kindergarten and first grade uses computers with voice output and IBM selectric typewriters to encourage writing and hence reading development. A study examined whether increased writing activity without the use of the technology would produce similar gains in reading. A classroom from the IBM…

A study was conducted to assess the effect of contrasting mastery learning procedures on the reading achievement of high and low ability students. Subjects were 48 high and 40 low ability first grade students randomly assigned to either a typical commercial basal reading series mastery treatment or an alternative mastery learning treatment that…

This study focused on whether a supplemental program in structural analysis would improve the reading proficiency of children identified as deficient in the syntax and inflections of their language. Sixty-nine second-grade children, whose psycholinguistic ages were determined by scores on a grammatic closure test, to be six months or more below…

The primary thesis of the "audread" model of language development is that children in a literate society first learn to think, then they learn to communicate and receive thoughts through oral language, and then they learn to communicate through written language (graphic representations). Four projects based on concepts from the audread…

Some basic pattern-analyzing functions that occur during the reading process are described in this paper. The functions deal mainly with the analysis of typographical factors such as word shape, spacing, and orientation, but they also interact with contextual variables. The research interpreted in the paper proposes an attentional model of reading…

The dependence of reading on speech is based on three assumptions: speech is the primary language system, acquired naturally without direct instruction; alphabetic writing systems are more or less phonetic representations of oral language; and speech appears to be an essential foundation for the acquisition of reading ability. By presupposing…

An exploration of specific deficits of learning disabled children, especially in the auditory system, is presented in this paper. Disorders of attention, perception, phonemic and visual discrimination, memory, and symbolization and conceptualization are considered. The paper develops several questions for teachers of learning disabled children to…