The purposes of the study were to determine whether phonic analysis training could be used to prepare children to be successful on the Auditory Analysis Test (AAT) of phonic skills and to then relate phonic knowledge to reading performance. Subjects were 40 first graders in suburban Pittsburgh who had attended kindergarten together. A group of 16…

Article suggests certain tasks must be performed before a pupil can learn to read. What these tasks are depends upon whether teaching method is analytic--introducing words as whole units to be broken down--or synthetic--introducing individual written signs as sounds, to be built up into meaningful units. (RW)

This report presents a summary of reading research conducted by the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP) during 1972-75. Research was conducted in four areas: student industriousness, reading readiness, teaching of sound-symbol relationships, and language (especially dialect interference). With regard to industriousness, it was found that…

Research indicates that the Wallach and Wallach tutorial reading program for low-readiness first graders which emphasizes phoneme identification skills is effective. (MKM)

A study examined the role of phonics instruction in beginning reading and culminated in a report which has been published as a book entitled "Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print." The study centered around the debate over whether phonics instruction promotes or impedes development of the attitudes and abilities required…

The purpose of this study was to determine if the relationships among alphabet skills, auditory discrimination, and visual discrimination for five-year-olds prior to kindergarten were similar to those found in studies of subskills of first grade children. The sample consisted of 23 middle class nursery school children between the ages of 5.1 and…

An attempt to build on oral language programs--such as the language experience approach--by adding a written language component and a phonics component, to make transition to reading more meaningful and reading skill development more systematic, was undertaken in the study described here. The program, called DIREKT, was conducted by two…

A year-long, quasi-experimental study investigated the comparative effects of a whole language approach and a code emphasis approach upon the emergent literacy of 53 girls in two kindergarten classes in an all girls' parochial school in the Northeast. Subjects in the experimental class received instruction in Holdaway's Shared Book Experience…

Concludes that, of several reading readiness factors, knowledge of alphabet letter names is the best predictor of phonics skills other than vowel recognition and of reading abilities involving words in insolation, and that number knowledge is the best predictor of reading abilities involving words and syntax. (FL)

A study was conducted to explore how children learn to read in kindergarten. The study employed a heuristic model that included entering ability, home background, instructional processes, home support for literacy development, and measures of student ability at the end of kindergarten. Children were tested, whole-day classroom observations were…

A small-group procedure for teaching consonant sounds was tested in two studies with rural kindergarten and first-grade students whose teachers had been trained to use the procedure by means of a videotape model and a live demonstration. In the first study, done at the end of the 1974-1975 school year, the kindergarten and first-grade participants…

This study examined the effects of two programs which differed in the methods they employed to develop reading readiness. The two methods represented were a language experience approach and a phonics approach. The subjects were children from kindergarten classes in two elementary schools in Flint, Michigan. All subjects were randomly assigned…

A 3-year study concerning teaching a phonics-oriented kindergarten readiness program of letter recognition and beginning consonant sounds was discussed. Sixty-eight children attending kindergarten in a suburban middle and upper-middle class community composed the sample. The experimental group consisted of 33 children; the control group consisted…

The effectiveness of prephonic training between kindergarten and first grade levels as a tool for acquiring reading skills was explored throughout the public school system in the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts. A sample population of 260 kindergartners was identified as having potential learning difficulties by the results shown on the…