This article summarises the linguistic base of initial reading and spelling in English for the benefit of teachers and others engaged in education who need explicit understanding of parts of the linguistic base in order to teach initial literacy accurately. The aspects covered are those most relevant to children entering formal schooling: spoken…

The ability to flexibly approach the pronunciation of unknown words, or set "for variability", has been shown to contribute to word recognition skills. However, this is the first study that has attempted to teach students strategies for increasing their set for variability. Beginning readers (N = 15) were instructed to correct oral…

Learning to read a relatively irregular orthography, such as English, is harder and takes longer than learning to read a relatively regular orthography, such as German. At the end of grade 1, the difference in reading performance on a simple set of words and nonwords is quite dramatic. Whereas children using regular orthographies are already close…

Phonics teaches learners how to match the letters of the alphabet to the speech sounds they already know. At age five, children who are ready to learn to read have a vocabulary of some 5,000 words and understand far more than that when they hear them. The problem is that there are 44 sounds in English and only 26 letters in the alphabet. Phonics…

This manual contains some of the history of the project "Initial Reading in Spanish for Bilingual Children," undertaken by the U.S. Office of Education in the spring of 1970. The objective of the project was to gather detailed information and to produce a descriptive analysis of the methodologies employed by teachers in the teaching of initial…