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…

The 12 activities presented in this pamphlet are intended to help make vocabulary study a stimulating experience for both teacher and student. The activities are as follows: (1) a commercially prepared list of suggestions for vocabulary development, (2) an exercise designed to relate vocabulary study to every day reading, (3) a variation of the…

Advocates a reworking of lexical pedagogy with reference to the instruction of techniques of expression. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Research supported by the Cooperative Research Program of the U.S. Office of Education, CRP-S-378.

A reading program developed to teach the minimum set of skills which enable children to recognize words as rapidly as possible through direct instruction in left-to-right orientation, blending, rhyming, and sounds is described. The materials for the program consist of teacher presentation notebooks used by the teachers in working with small groups…

A component tryout of first-grade spelling was conducted using students who received concurrent reading instruction based on Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) materials. Pretest and posttest measures obtained from four comparable first-grade classes were used as baseline data against which to judge program effectiveness. This report describes…

Three reputed advantages of using a letter-combination (LC) approach, as opposed to a grapheme-unit (GU) approach for initial word-attack and spelling instruction are critically analyzed. While LC reduces the number of elements per word, it also reduces the number of words that can be generated. LC eliminates distortion in the final…

This curriculum guide is intended to assist Latin teachers in the School District of Philadelphia in achieving one of the goals of Latin instruction: the development of word power in English through a structured study of Latin roots and affixes. The guide may be used in two different ways. First, it may form the basis for a separate…

Tests for four letter-sound generalizations--"c" pronounced as [k] or [s] and "a" pronounced as [ae] or [e]--were given to 73 first, second, and third grade children at six-week intervals during a single school year. Each test included five synthetic words (e.g., cipe, acim, bice, cib, ocet) for each generalization. Children responded individually…

An instructional package was developed to help junior college students weak in word attack skills related to phonics and the ability to discriminate by the most efficient use of the auditory, visual, and analytical faculties. The programed package was designed to permit the student independence and privacy and to introduce a rapid and emotionally…

This book is designed to provide teachers with the information necessary to help their students to cope successfully and independently with unfamiliar words. Three sources of aid in word identification are discussed, to provide a balance to the current overemphasis on phonics decoding as the only way for children to identify words. The three areas…