Focusing on research about children's acquisition of reading and spelling skills, this paper discusses the larger picture of reading acquisition, issues addressed by research, and results of this research. The paper cites numerous studies on the subject, including studies on whether environmental print experiences enable young children to process graphic cues, how beginning readers get started using graphic cues to read words, whether beginning readers could learn to read words more easily using visual or phonetic cues, how phonetic cue readers learn to read and spell words and how they differ from cipher readers, how beginning readers acquire a lexicon of printed words, how spelling can perform a mnemonic function, and how children's memories function for words containing silent letters. Other studies tested the theory that creating and storing a special spelling pronunciation for words should boost memory for the spellings, examined the influence of spellings on children's conceptions of phonemes in words to see if learning spellings would alter children's ideas about speech, and observed whether spellings influence pronunciations. Conclusions and results of the studies are provided. References and tables of findings are included. (EL)