This study examined the validity of letter-name fluency and nonsense word fluency (NWF) measures as indicators of early reading skill with 39 kindergarten children who were tested again in first grade. Evidence supportive of validity was found for both measures, with NWF receiving the strongest support and both fluency measures more sensitive than…

This study involved 103 kindergartners, 52 of whom received instruction on a picture-word processor system. Results indicate that students who received the picture-word processor instruction responded enthusiastically to the system and did significantly better in reading than those who received no instruction. (SH)

Three standardized measures of short-term memory (STM) were compared to determine their relative efficacy in predicting reading achievement for 36 primary-grade students over a two-year period. A letter sequences test was found to be the most frequently associated with reading performance. A memory-for-sentences task also showed a significant…

Demonstrates that discrimination training with verbal materials (words and letters) is generally more helpful than training with non-verbal forms. (RB)

This study surveyed all-day and half-day Ohio kindergarten teachers regarding their reading or reading readiness instructional practices. First grade teachers in the same schools assessed the preparation and experiences of their incoming students. A Chi Square analysis comparing all-day and half-day programs revealed more areas of similarity than…

To investigate the relationship between a kindergartner's prior experience with print and the child's scores on Marie Clay's Concepts About Print Test, a study examined 23 kindergarten students from an upper middle class neighborhood. A 27-item questionnaire was given to parents at the beginning of the school year, asking what their children knew…

The Pre-reading Skills Program (PRS) was developed at the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning. Research on prereading skills was conducted from 1966 to 1969. The developmental period, 1970 to 1974, included piloting and field testing instructional materials, teachers' manuals, assessment instruments, and a management…

Learning music can help children with reading readiness and beginning reading skills. (MKM)

Word-learning and reading-readiness tasks administered to inner-city kindergartners indicated that readiness skills included both a general skill that predicted success for both sight-word and sound-symbol methods of instruction and other specific skills which predicted success for only one method of instruction. (AA)

Explores the concept of emergent literacy, discussing what children know about reading and writing, how they come to know it, and what this information means for classroom practices and school policy. (MM)

To answer the question of how phonemic awareness works to facilitate reading acquisition, this paper explores the fundamental connection between phonemic awareness, the alphabetic principle, and phonics in learning to read. The paper undertook a literature review to prove that phonemic awareness is an essential element in the path to literacy. It…

Describes the rationale for The Informal Reading-Language Test, then presents the test. (FL)

Examined the relationship between cognitive style and reading readiness in 104 kindergarteners before and after a visual discrimination treatment designed to modify conceptual impulsivity. Correlations were also obtained between errors and latencies on the Matching Familiar Figures Test and performance on the Metropolitan Readiness Test. No…