The rhetoric of the reading wars has become more than just an armchair academic debate, but is encoded now in the very laws, house and senate bills, and legislative policies of the majority of the states. In turn, these policies are powered by staggering sums of money such as the 90-million-dollar investment of Fulton County, Georgia in a revamp…

Across all the domains of child development, we need to understand the temporal relationship between variables suspected to underpin growth; reading research is no exception. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of the direction of the relationship between children's morphological awareness, or the awareness of and ability to manipulate the…

Describes the development of one child's awareness of print and the stages he passed through while learning to read from birth to age two. (FL)

Reports on naturalistic research studies revealing that children begin to learn to read and write long before they go to school. (JL)

Study results do not demonstrate that early reading is made possible by precocity in speech-sound segmentation, blending, or discrimination ability, but that the complex skill involving the manipulation of sounds in temporal order may be more closely related to early reading ability. (AEA)

ARGUMENTS AGAINST FORMALIZED READING INSTRUCTION IN THE KINDERGARTEN WERE PRESENTED. AFTER PRELIMINARY COMMENTS CONCERNING THE PURPOSE AND PLAN OF THE CONFERENCE, THE NEW JERSEY STATE BOARD STANDARDS FOR KINDERGARTENS WERE DISCUSSED IN LIGHT OF THEIR CRITERIA FOR ESTABLISHMENT AND THEIR ADMINISTRATION. THE CASE AGAINST MAKING READING INSTRUCTION A…

Reading can be defined as a meaningful interaction with a print setting. Interactive models of reading assume that lower level and higher level processing occurs simultaneously, interacting with each other. The familiarity of the book, the context in which a sign occurs, and the illustrations of a book are all examples of print setting cues that…

Argues that while many publishers may simplify the sentence structure in the basal reader to facilitate the process of learning to read, this practice may result in texts with stylistic features and text formats that are unnatural and uncharacteristic of written English or the language development level of the children. (FL)

Some children become capable readers and writers before ever attending school and without exposure to formal instruction. This phenomenon--sometimes referred to as natural literacy development--is not, in the strictest sense, natural; as the adult presents much of the literacy environment to the child in a socialized, mediated form, teaching is…

A case study of a young boy's learning to read and write from the beginnings of literacy at age 5 up to age 11, after reading and writing have converged, is the focus of this book. The first part of the book, a description of his learning to write, discusses invented spelling, research about other young spellers and writers, the shift toward…

A study was conducted to determine if knowledge of the purposes of written language facilitated reading achievement in preschool children. The study also compared the performance of boys and girls to determine if boys' generally poorer reading abilities could be related to differences in print awareness. Scores from the comprehension subtest of…

Drawing upon data from a series of studies, this paper analyzes children's verbalizations about a wordless picture book to discover any relationships between a child's learning style and his or her comprehension of events in the book. Using the definitions of learning style established by M. Rosenberg, the paper also compares the behavior of…

To determine developmental patterns in emergent reading behaviors of young children, a longitudinal study was conducted of two-, three-, and four-year-old children's language when asked to "read" a favorite storybook. Thirty-two middle and low income children from a daycare center took part in four studies spaced over a year; four children were…