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…

Reading instruction should be modified to make it compatible with students' perceptual skills. Assessing the adequacy of a student's perception is pertinent to planning his reading instructional program--not because the teacher can then teach to a preferred modality but, rather, because it can help the teacher determine whether the student has…

In this study, two hypotheses are examined: (1) There is a positive correlation between the incidence of dialect speech of black second graders and their perception that dialect speech is "bad." (2) Use of dialect speech does not interfere with the speaker's ability to identify words in traditional orthography. The study established language…

This volume is an organized collection of papers which were presented at the International Reading Association convention at Atlantic City. The authors are scholars concerned with early childhood education. They explore topics that range from conclusions drawn from research on implicit speech to the advisability of teaching reading to…

This paper examines the letter recognition difficulties of 322 primary grade students with decoding problems. Each student was asked to name all of the lower case letters, which were presented in non-alphabetical order. Each response was accurately recorded to determine which letters were taken for others. All responses were then tallied, and an…

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…

This study was a follow-up of a three year longitudinal study of factors affecting learning to read. It examined the efficacy of four different approaches to beginning reading instruction on subsequent reading achievement in grade four. Major purposes were to determine what effect maturation and exposure to a non-experimental typical grade four…

This collection of articles by experts in reading and in language arts contains nine sections: "Educational Change: New Trends and Directions" discusses humanizing teacher education, accountability and the school volunteer; "Instructional Implications from the Disciplines" discusses the reading process, Piaget and reading instruction, and the…

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…