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

A Russian method of teaching beginning reading using auditory discrimination of phonemes training was shown to be superior to two American methods. (JH)

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…

DATA RELEVANT TO THE FOLLOWING THREE QUESTIONS WERE DRAWN FROM 27 INDIVIDUAL STUDIES COMPRISING THE COOPERATIVE RESEARCH PROGRAM IN FIRST-GRADE READING INSTRUCTION--(1) TO WHAT EXTENT ARE VARIOUS PUPIL, TEACHER, CLASS, SCHOOL, AND COMMUNITY CHARACTERISTICS RELATED TO ACHIEVEMENT IN FIRST-GRADE READING AND SPELLING, (2) WHICH APPROACH TO INITIAL…

Since psycholinguistic research suggests that readers ascribe meaning by sampling grapho-phonemic, syntactic, and semantic text features, a study was conducted to investigate which cue strategies readers of different abilities utilized, and whether these strategies were mediated by levels of cognitive development. The subjects were 50 second grade…

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…

A study using four groups, each of 25 first graders, indicated that letter-naming ability does not facilitate learning to read words composed of the same letters. One group was taught to discriminate between four artificial graphemes by identifying them with different geometric forms. The second group was taught to give the graphemes the letter…

This study was concerned with assessing both prereading and reading activities on the kindergarten level. A questionnaire survey was made of selected aspects of the content and conduct of the kindergarten prereading and reading programs in school districts throughout the state of California. The questionnaire used consisted of three parts: Part 1…

This literature review groups reports and studies, on the usefulness of television technology in the teaching of reading, into two broad categories, those in which the medium is used to actually teach sound-symbol relationships and those in which the medium is used as a motivational device to interest children in print. "Sesame Street" and…

The purpose of this research was to determine the effectiveness of the Frostig Developmental Program of Visual Perception in effecting gains in reading readiness scores and perceptual motor ability with kindergarten students and reading achievement scores and perceptual motor ability with grade one students. High, middle and low groups in both…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between performance on Piagetian conservation tasks and the ability to form hypotheses as to the probable content of story material among first and second grade children. Cognitive operations selected for comparison were operations concerning conservation of mass, conservation of…

Using instruments which measured reading readiness, intelligence, reading achievement, and school attitudes, data was gathered to evaluate the hypothesis that the reading achievement of first grade boys taught by a male teacher would be significantly higher than those taught by a female teacher and, conversely, that the reading achievement of…

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)

Presents research findings about the development of metalinguistic awareness (MLA) in young children. Discusses MLA and reading readiness, and the implications for beginning reading instruction. Suggests various reading methods which allow children with both high and low levels of MLA to develop literacy. (MM)