Describes the development of an instructional model for training preschool/daycare/kindergarten staff in the area of reading readiness. Concludes that the model was effective. (FL)

Compares the stages of print awareness in two children to emphasize the developmental stages of literacy. Emphasizes the importance of parents and teachers responding appropriately as children develop their reading and writing skills. (HTH)

Reports results of a three-year longitudinal study exploring the evolution of young children's ideas about reading. Finds that there was only moderate consistency in the ages at which concepts emerged and that the sequence of conceptual development was quite uniform across these children. (SR)

Highlighted by Katy's early reading and writing experiences, guidelines to help young children become effective readers and writers are offered to parents and teachers. (BB)

Tests the statement in "Becoming a Nation of Readers" that kindergartners can name an average of 14 letters. Finds that a more realistic distribution is bi-modal in that most kindergartners know 8 or fewer letters, and only a few can name more than 20 letters. (RS)

Discusses the concept of emergent literacy, summarizing several theories and studies on children's early experiences with reading and writing. Examines the implications of this research for beginning reading and writing instruction. (MM)

Parents are not recommended to teach their preschoolers to read. Although some children learn to read before school, forcing a child to read can have many damaging effects. Instead, parents are encouraged to talk to their child, to develop important reading readiness skills in their child, and to build their child's background of experiences. (TM)

Outlines how contemporary reading theorists conceptualize reading fluency, discussing why it is a good indicator of reading process efficiency. Suggests ways to foster development of reading fluency. Children must acquire the automatic word and phrase processing that enables fluent reading and lets them allocate cognitive capacity to…

Presents case study of 40-month-old girl with word reading age of 8.5 years, focusing on her phoneme awareness, productive spelling, and phonological recoding. Concludes that her phonological recoding was an implicit process based on sublexical relations induced from her lexical representations rather than explicitly taught letter-sound…

Assessment of early reading development is important for all stakeholders. It can identify children who need special instruction and provide useful information to parents as well as summative accounts of early achievement in schools. Researchers at the Center for Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA) investigated early reading…

The authors examined the developmental relations between language acquisition and emergence of reading prior to formal literacy instruction. Sixty-one Finnish-speaking children were followed up once a year from infancy to school start (1 year 0 months-7 years 3 months). Before entering first grade, 43% of the children were classified as emergent…

Are programs that emphasize systematic phonics instruction truly superior to other types of programs for young readers, as the National Reading Panel claims? The authors conducted a study of three different programs to see what kinds of readers are actually emerging from them. Two were commercial programs that used explicit and systematic phonics…

This study examined the effects of the Waterford Early Reading Program on reading achievement gains across the first-grade year. The results of this longitudinal analysis demonstrated meaningfully greater gains on reading achievement for those with access to the Integrated learning system (ILS) (n[superscript 2] =.10). Furthermore, the positive…

Many studies have examined the relationship between environmental processes and literacy outcomes. However, nearly all of this research has examined biologically related family members living together, thus confounding genetic and environmental influences. The purpose of this study was to address this issue using a sample of 262 adopted children…

This study explored developmental differences in children's segmentation skills of VC and CV syllables (e.g., /af/ and /fa/) in relation to their early reading abilities. To this end, we followed a subgroup of Dutch speaking prereaders who participated in Geudens and Sandra (2003, Experiment 1), and replicated the segmentation task in first grade,…