Kindergartners with disabilities (n=31), without disabilities (n=57), and children repeating kindergarten (n=19) were studied to compare the effects of an activity-based phonological instruction. Results indicate that teachers can improve the phonological skills of their students prior to formal reading instruction and that instruction to children…

Investigates effectiveness of the Project Early Access to Success in Education, which includes parent education sessions on assisting their children's developing literacy abilities, at-school parent/child activities, and at-home book-mediated activities. Finds improvement in language skills, with a strong impact on the children who scored low at…

Examines relations between academic self-concept (ASC) and measures of reading-related performance and self-concept in 60 beginning school children who were assessed as having positive, negative, or typical ASCs. Data reveals that children with negative ASCs performed poorly on reading-related tasks and reported more negative reading self-concepts…

This article discusses home/family factors related to the development of emergent literacy skills in preschool-age children and presents the Home Literacy Inventory for assessing children's non-print activities, reading activities, writing activities, and current reading and writing abilities. How the information can be used to develop…

Considers whether the development of reading skills in different orthographies varies primarily as a function of common underlying cognitive processes, or as a function of orthographic transparency. Concludes that when the script is less complex young children appear to develop their word recognition skills with relative ease, even in the absence…

Investigated caption use, sound, and reading behavior of 76 children who had just completed 2nd grade. The present study indicated that beginning readers recognize more words when they view television that uses captions. Captions, by evoking efforts to read, appeared to help a child focus on central story elements and away from distracting…

Within alphabetic languages, spelling-to-sound consistency can differ dramatically. For example, English and German are very similar in their phonological and orthographic structure but not in their consistency. In English the letter "a" is pronounced differently in the words "bank," "ball," and "park,"…

Reading was, is, and always must come first in the early school years. Without a firm basis in reading, children are going to have a tough time in school and, later, in the world beyond the elementary school doors. Children need math and all the other wonderful things they are exposed to in school, but without some degree of success in reading,…

This article compares the development of print and braille reading in children who are blind and sighted in relation to Chall's stage model of reading development. Chall's model includes a prereading period, in which concepts are developed; middle stages, in which skills that are necessary for decoding text are developed; and later stages, which…

Ninety Chinese children were tested once at age 4 and again 22 months later on phonological-processing and other reading skills. Chinese phonological-processing skills alone modestly predicted Chinese character recognition, and English letter-name knowledge uniquely predicted reading of both Chinese and English 2 years later. Furthermore,…

This study examined how school-aged children process different grammatical categories. Event-related brain potentials elicited by words in visually presented sentences were analyzed according to seven grammatical categories with naturally varying characteristics of linguistic functions, semantic features, and quantitative attributes of length and…

The art of spoken word has captured youthful spirits all over the country, especially in heterogeneous urban centers. In this essay, the author opens up for re-consideration a central issue in language arts education, one suggested by the very writing of spoken word: how educators think about the relationship between oral and written language and…

Phonological awareness, an understanding that spoken language is comprised of individual sounds, is an important construct that has implications for educational assessment and intervention. Unfortunately, the relationship between phonological awareness and its many operationalizations is ambiguous, resulting in both theoretical and practical…

In recent years, much has been written about effective beginning reading instruction. Most professionals agree that early literacy instruction should include (a) phonemic awareness activities; (b) instruction in letter-sound relationships; (c) instruction in sounding out words and recognizing simple high frequency words at sight, (d) reading…

"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"…