We evaluated two experimenter-delivered, small-group word reading programs among at-risk poor readers in Grade 1 classes of regular elementary schools using a two-arm, dual-site-matched control trial intervention. At-risk poor word readers (n = 201) were allocated to either (a) Direct Mapping and Set-for-Variability (DMSfV) or (b) Current or…

This teaching tip applies research on phoneme awareness (PA) to propose an instructional model for teaching PA. Research suggests children need to learn the identifying features of phonemes to recognize them in spoken words. In the model, teachers focus on one phoneme at a time; make it memorable to children through sound analogies supported by…

Writing is often considered secondary to the spoken language, as it is only coded sound-by-sound. But other scholars have demonstrated that writing is similar to "arithmetic": a cognitive structuring, a shift to the meta-level ("for the eye"). "Handwriting" (referred to here as the cursive writing in the sense of…

Acquisition of phoneme-grapheme correspondences, a key concept of the alphabetic principle, was examined in young children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) using a semantic association strategy embedded in two interventions, the Children's Early Intervention and Foundations for Literacy. Single-subject design experiments using multiple…

This paper reports findings from a large-scale evaluation undertaken to explore the impact of the "linguistic phonics approach" (LPA) on young children's reading. The LPA is a systematic and applied programme that differs from traditional phonics programmes. For example, rather than ask children to look at letters and speculate on the…

Six primary school-aged braille students were taught to name 4 to 10 braille letters as phonemes and another 4 to 10 braille letters as graphemes (Study 1). They were then taught to name 10 braille words as onset-rimes and another 10 braille words as whole words (Study 2). Instruction in phonemes and onset rimes resulted in fewer trials and a…

This study attempted to provide a systematic framework for phonics instruction for beginning readers in literature-based classrooms based on relative frequency of phoneme-grapheme occurrences found in three distinct corpora. The first corpus contained an academic word list. The second corpus contained the running text from 363 books identified as…

Six primary school-aged braille students were taught to name 4 to 10 braille letters as phonemes and another 4 to 10 braille letters as graphemes (Study 1). They were then taught to name 10 braille words as onset-rimes and another 10 braille words as whole words (Study 2). Instruction in phonemes and onset rimes resulted in fewer trials and a…

Reading words may take several forms. Readers may utilize decoding, analogizing, or predicting to read unfamiliar words. Readers read familiar words by accessing them in memory, called sight word reading. With practice, all words come to be read automatically by sight, which is the most efficient, unobtrusive way to read words in text. The process…

"We cannot allow the quality of special services to preclude conquering reading disabilities (Horne, 1978, p. 582)." This study was conducted to explore how teachers' spelling abilities relate to student outcomes. The results indicated that the students enrolled in classrooms where the teachers had the lowest knowledge of phoneme-grapheme…

The purpose of this study was to determine the development of four specific letter-sound patterns from second through sixth grade: invariant consonants, long and short vowels, "c," and"g." A 69-item list was presented to second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade subjects in one of two random orders. Oral responses were tape recorded, transcribed by…

This article discusses an aspect of the process of learning to read and write which has received little attention, that is, the ability of children to recognize and to distinguish clearly the sounds which correspond to the individual letters within each word. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

Two groups of sighted pre-school children were taught to name six braille letters: one group received phoneme instruction and the other grapheme instruction. Ten boys and ten girls (average age 4:5 years) participated. There was a statistically significant advantage for the phoneme group (Experiment 1). In a repeated measures design, 16 sighted…

STUDY OBJECTIVES WERE--(1) TO ANALYZE 5,000 ENGLISH WORDS TO FIND THE UNDERLYING PATTERNS IN THE SPELLING-TO-SOUND RELATIONSHIPS, (2) TO DEVELOP A MODEL FOR MAPPING SPELLING-TO-SOUND CORRESPONDENCES WHICH NOT ONLY DISPLAYS IN AN ECONOMICAL FASHION THE UNDERLYING SPELLING PATTERNS, BUT ALSO REFLECTS THE SPELLING-TO-SOUND HABITS OF THE MATURE…

The employment of the graphoneme approach in reading instruction is based on several generally accepted concepts regarding the learning process and the nature of the English language. A graphoneme is a closed syllable, a syllable which begins with a vowel and ends with a consonant, and it is thought to be the stable unit in the relationship…