This volume, a revision of "Phonics and the Teaching of Reading," is designed to offer practical help to teachers, especially in the area of phonics. Attention is given to the influence that linguistics has had on reading over the last decade and to those features of linguistics that have affected phonics methodology and instructional materials.…

This book is concerned with the skill of learning to read and factors primarily related to teaching the beginning reading skills. The contents include: "Rationale," which discusses abilities related to reading, reading as a different medium, decoding coming before reading, decoding as separate from reading, hypotheses for decoding, and a…

This paper analyzes evidence related to the effectiveness of vowel generalization from two viewpoints: the nature of letter-sound and sound-letter relationships as derived from Dewey, Hanna, and Hillerich, and the nature of these relationships as derived from results of teaching vowel generalizations to children. From the evidence and the research…

Suggestions for various activities, games, and materials for teaching phonics are presented in this handbook for teachers and teachers in training. The chapters and materials covered include: (1) "Why Phonics," which presents the rationale for teaching phonics; (2) "A Suggested Order for Teaching Phonics," which discusses the order of difficulty…

The effectiveness of prephonic training between kindergarten and first grade levels as a tool for acquiring reading skills was explored throughout the public school system in the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts. A sample population of 260 kindergartners was identified as having potential learning difficulties by the results shown on the…

The purpose of this study was to compare the ability to pronounce synthetic words of children who learned to read by methods emphasizing early, intensive phonics instruction with the ability of children who learned to read by methods utilizing delayed and less intensive phonics instruction. The sample was selected from among second, third, and…

Use of the syllable as a unit for initial acquisition of reading is advocated. It is argued that since English alphabetic writing is based on a mapping between sound-stream and symbol, a decoding approach is necessary at early stages of the acquisition process. However, conventional phonics methods confound two very difficult tasks in initial…