Many South African children struggle in acquiring literacy and reading skills. It seems as if caregivers may be missing an important aspect in guiding children's emergent reading development. The question is whether there are underlying concepts needed for emergent literacy and the acquisition of reading skills. The nature of the reading process…

Forty-four children, identified by their kindergarten teachers as independent readers upon public school entrance, were interviewed to assess their perceptions of how and when they learned to read. In addition to interviews, the children's literacy behaviors were observed in their normal classroom settings and in individual shared book experiences…

The study explores the relationship between phonological awareness and early reading for bilingual children learning to read in two languages that use different writing systems. Participants were 57 Cantonese-English bilingual 6-year-olds who were learning to read in both languages. The children completed cognitive measures, phonological awareness…

A sample of 236 4- to 6-year olds was tested on aspects of lexical and sublexical development while learning to read and retested 1 year later. Reading development, the influence of lexical and sublexical processes, age differences, and implications for instruction are discussed. (SLD)

States that children with hyperlexia who learn to read spontaneously before age five are impaired in reading and listening comprehension but have word recognition skills well above their measured cognitive and linguistic abilities. Administers phonemic awareness measures to three early readers. Finds that all three children's phonemic awareness…

This study uses latent transition analysis to examine reading development across the kindergarten and 1st-grade year. Data include poverty status and dichotomous measures of reading at 4 time points for a large sample of children within the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. In each of 4 waves of the study, 5 latent classes were represented in…

This issue focuses on the developmental path that children typically take when learning to read. The purpose is to help parents take steps to ensure that their children will make the transition from learning to read to reading to learn by the end of third grade. An introductory section includes two articles: "Parents, Children, and…

Defining early reading as reading that occurs prior to the time that a child begins formal schooling, this annotated bibliography contains references on the topic from a variety of sources that include journals, books, conference proceedings, ERIC documents, dissertations, and theses and that represent the research in a number of countries. The…

Focusing on the not-yet-conventional ways in which young children write and read--their nature, contexts, and significance for continuing literacy development, this book presents the perspective that children's early reading and writing behaviors are not pre- anything, but are integral parts of an incipient language process. Following an…