A teacher in an East Tennessee elementary school observed after a year of kindergarten that her students had a hard time recognizing their letters based on the Brigance Test. She taught one letter a week by thematic instruction, and she was concerned her students would not be ready to read if they did not know their letters. A study was conducted…

Nineteen kindergarten children were pretested on readiness and blending tests and randomly assigned to a control or experimental group to determine if auditory blending skills were teachable and important in a beginning reading program. Following instruction in sequencing and blending sounds, the experimental group gained significantly in both…

Illustrates how it is possible for teachers to prepare children for reading without workbooks and formal texts. (FL)

A discrete-trial reaction time methodology was employed measuring speeds of skilled and less skilled readers in naming colors, pictures, numbers, letters, and words. Less skilled nondyslexic children don't exhibit a general name retrieval deficit; rather, research shows phonological analysis skills are integral in early reading acquisition.…

Describes how children develop printed word knowledge when taught with a top-down, sentence-based approach. Cites four stages in word knowledge development: word as a nameable object in text; word as an object with a beginning element; word as an object with a discernible beginning and end; and word as an object with a beginning, middle, and end.…

Measures the relationship between developmental maturity of kindergartners and their performance on a reading readiness test. Finds no significant differences in reading readiness based on age or sex. (RS)

Describes how to implement the technique called "Read a Book in an Hour" with children at the critical transition stage when they are faced with longer texts and fewer illustrations. Provides a list of books appropriate for teachers who wish to use the technique with upper primary students. (KEH)

This study analyzes the quantity and quality of English used orally by 6-year-old Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservation Indian children. Interviews, conducted by American Indian teacher aides following a standardized interview guide, were recorded on cassette tapes. Random samples of the tapes were transcribed and analyzed for total utterances,…

Investigates letter discrimination training and its transfer to a trigram recognition task. (RB)

An elementary school in Texas has developed a program of reading instruction that immediately provides early readers with ample reading opportunities and materials rather than constraining them with "reading readiness" assessment. Initially, the absence of sufficient reinforcement material in the basal readers required increased amounts of reading…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine syntax comprehension by poor and average prereaders in first grade and poor and average readers in second grade, to determine whether a relationship exists between reading ability or reading readiness and comprehension of syntax. Subjects were 55 first-grade children and 56 second-grade children of…

In the summer of 1968, a workshop was held to produce a reading booklet to be used especially by migrant children. The booklet was to: (1) take about 2 weeks of class time, (2) appeal to the migrant child with his special set of needs, (3) be as interesting and creative as possible, and (4) have a built-in pre- and posttesting program for…

Compared were the effects of mainstream or special class placement on the acquisition of reading skills and self concept with a total of 84 kindergarten or first grade learning disabled students. Significant differences were found between the two groups on only one of the four tests given: the letter names subtest of the Murphy-Durrell Analysis.…

The purpose of this investigation was to study the effect of controlling the letters used in words both for a training program designed to improve visual discrimination and for a word recognition task. The experiment was designed to investigate the influence of simultaneous and successive discrimination learning with stimuli which varied in…