Teaching and learning literacy in the early years can be a joyful, explorative and meaningful experience. This accessible book will give teachers and practitioners the practical and theoretical skills and knowledge they require to successfully and confidently teach reading, writing and oral skills in the early years classroom. Foregrounding the…

"Emergent literacy" is defined as the developmental process beginning at birth in which children acquire the foundation for reading and writing, including language, listening comprehension, concepts of print, alphabetic knowledge, and phonological awareness. The environment within which emergent literacy skills develop is also an important…

The importance of emergent literacy skills as a foundation for proficient reading has led to the development of interventions to teach these skills. These interventions are particularly important for children from disadvantaged homes because they often lack the home literacy experiences necessary for building foundational literacy skills prior to…

Reviews selected instructional procedures in the four reading readiness skills that can be taught and learned: auditory discrimination, auditory comprehension, visual discrimination, and visual memory. Stresses that readiness skills are prerequisite to reading skills. (RS)

It was hypothesized that nonverbal auditory-visual processing skills relevant to reading could be investigated through a music program structured to parallel the verbal decoding process. The current investigation consisted of three endeavors: the development of a nonverbal reading prototype (through the application of music); the development of a…

Instruction in narrative text structure on first graders' listening and reading comprehension was examined with a view to documenting strategy instruction and transfer of learning in beginning readers. Of interest was whether or not first-grade students (n=35) would, following instruction within the context of listening to stories, gain in…