Argues that there is a developmental relationship between children's performances in reading and writing tasks and describes two diagnostic tasks that teachers can use to assess young children's developing concepts of words in reading and in writing, without interfering with the natural processes of learning to read and write. (HTH)

While word discrimination studies based on the subjects' conscious manipulation of words--for example, counting the number of words in a line--indicate that beginning readers are unskilled in identifying word boundaries, tests using such indirect methods of assessment as word recognition reveal a strong correlation between the ability to…