"Waterford Early Reading Level One"[TM] is an emergent literacy curriculum that uses computer-based technology to prepare children for reading. It begins with a tutorial to familiarize the child with the computer and mouse and a reading placement evaluation to assess and determine whether a child should work on "Level One"…

This research synthesis identifies areas of convergence in reading research regarding the importance, dimensions, and effects of phonological awareness on the reading acquisition process. It also highlights similarities and differences between normal achievers and diverse learners. The following five areas of research convergence are identified:…

An interactive/cognitive model can account for the acquisition of a graphophonemic system by young children and be compatible with the cuing explanation, which posits that readers use their graphophonemic knowledge in coordination with their knowledge of language and the world to make sense of print. Explanations in the research literature of how…

Traditionally, reading instruction has emphasized the visual-sound correspondences in language. The illusion that words can be "sounded-out" letter by letter and word by word to produce meaning needs to be re-evaluated according to the psycholinguistic nature of the reading process. Some nonvisual aspects of reading which are…

This paper reviews some recent research on the component skills necessary to learn to read by phonic techniques. The review is divided into four sections, each relating research on one of the skills necessary for novel word decoding. The four skill areas are: (1) learning invariant grapheme-phoneme correspondences; (2) relating the isolated letter…

Selected by the International Reading Association's Committee on Psycholinguistics and Reading, the papers in this volume were first presented at the 1968 IRA Preconvention Institute: (1) "Reading Is Only Incidentally Visual" (Kolers) suggests that the teaching of reading should move away from the purely visual; (2) "Some Thoughts on Spelling"…

Words were used as the stimulus factors to test the two-stage reading process. The first stage is a decoding stage in which the words are perceived and translated into an acoustic code, and the second stage is a semantic matching stage in which words were categorized into three phonological factors (word length, vowel complexity, and regularity)…

Concludes that beginning reading instruction organized around a phonic decoding model effectively teaches beginners how to decode novel (untaught) words, and that sound blending is important in this process. (RL)

Using kindergarten subjects, a study examined whether prereaders learned better with visual cues while novice readers learned better with phonetic cues. (HOD)

This news digest issue, which accompanies a bibliography titled "Learning Strategies for Students with Learning Disabilities", focuses on two promising interventions for students with learning disabilities: helping students develop their use of learning strategies and helping them develop their phonological awareness. In the first…

First-graders taught reading by phonics or language experience approach were compared on their ability to orally decode lists of words identified as either real or nonsense words. The two groups did not differ in overall correct responses, nor were their strategies influenced by the "real/nonsense" directions. (SJL)

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if beginning readers with accelerated sight word vocabularies would identify more functional spelling patterns than beginning readers not making the same progress. (HOD)

Blending and spelling training were compared to determine which intervention would improve the decoding skills of two first-grade boys with learning disabilities. Although neither intervention proved superior, the children met the learning criterion with both interventions and demonstrated both maintenance and generalization of their skills. (DB)

This article proposes that meaning and form (the sound-letter correspondences) are both important in beginning reading, but that initially they should be taught separately. Support for this position is provided, and a two-stage model of preliteracy development is offered, with the first stage emphasizing meaning and the second stage emphasizing…

This article examines characteristics of low-performing readers, especially their poor word recognition skills; compares approaches to teaching word recognition to slow-learning children; identifies characteristics of successful methods of teaching word recognition; and concludes that phonics-based, thoroughly systematic, direct instruction is…