A study (replicating a similar 1977 study by S. Stotsky), examined whether current basal series teach prefixion clearly. Teacher's guides, student texts, and workbooks of nine popular basal reader series were examined to ascertain whether they offered a clear definition of the term "prefix" and whether that definition was reinforced by…

A sample of 79 first grade children, selected from a total sample of 350 subjects from an upper middle class school district, were involved in this study. The sample population was divided into three reading groups (depending on their reading scores) to permit statistical comparisons among groups with differentiated reading achievements. A battery…

This study investigated the effects on oral reading reversals of various contextual conditions ranging from no context to highly predictable contexts among white, middle-class, male first graders. The study was designed to demonstrate the relationship between language redundancy and reversals in a beginning reading population in order to suggest…

This study investigated the relation between field independence/field dependence (FI/FD) and reading success. One hundred kindergarten children from a predominantly white, middle-class community were administered a Portable Rod and Frame Test as a measure of cognitive style. The upper and lower 27% were identified and designated Field Dependent…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the Distar Reading and Language Program as a method for beginning reading instruction. The subjects in the Distar group were 24 prekindergarteners, 60 kindergarteners, and 68 first graders. There were 24 children in the control prekindergarten group, 61 in the kindergarten, and 72 in…

The major goal of this study was to investigate first grade children's ability to use initial letter, middle letter, final letter and word configuration cues to recognize words in context. Subjects were forty-six children, 23 boys and 23 girls, from both first grade classes of a private school in suburban Philadelphia. Three letter words were…

In order to determine whether a child can learn to read more easily from a meaningful context, a six-year-old child was taught to read by a meaning-based approach in which lexical items were introduced in sentences and the semantic context of the material was suited to the child's level of development. This instructional approach also incorporated…

Ten easy-to-read books were examined for readability using Fry's Readability Graph and Betts' criteria for oral reading performance. Five first-grade and second-grade children read selected passages from each of the ten books. A correlation of 0.73 was obtained between rank orders according to readability graph scores and according to oral reading…

The purposes of this study were to determine the effect of word length on the learning difficulty of words found in reading materials for early primary level children, to determine learning difficulty indices of a set of fifty words, to compare the effectiveness of three methods of vocabulary instruction, and to replicate treatments for thirteen…

The relationship between gender and reading achievement and gender and early literacy experiences was examined. It was hypothesized that gender differences do not exist in relation to reading achievement, but early literacy experiences do differ in relation to gender. Subjects were students in grades 6, 7, and 8. Results indicate that there are no…

This report describes a program for increasing phonemic awareness in the primary grades. The targeted population consisted of first and second grade students from middle class communities located in the Midwest. Research indicated that students who enter primary grades without phonemic awareness might have reading difficulties. Lack of phonemic…

Children, four, six, eight, and twelve years old, and adults participated in a study of judgments of syllable similarity. Subjects listened to a disyllabic nonsense unit (the standard) followed by two comparison stimuli; they were then asked to choose the comparison stimulus "most like" the standard. Changes between the comparison stimuli and the…

This study was designed to assess the intercorrelations of selected variables of reading readiness to determine which measures were related. It was hypothesized that there are no underlying language factors which can be identified within a selected group of assessments, and that neither the original variables nor any factors, if found, predict the…

The use of words in isolation, words with pictures, and words in sentence context in teaching word recognition to beginning readers was studied in a sample of 54 boys and 54 girls. These 108 pupils were randomly assigned to the three treatment groups; each child was individually taught the target words. Learning was assessed on five dependent…

The effectiveness of the Three Owls Reading Method was tested, using 53 children from a Head Start program. The Three Owls system combines sight, phonic, and linguistic reading methods with movement and touch modes of instruction. After a pretest for phonic letter recognition, the students were matched and assigned to one of two classes in a…