Followed beginning readers to examine phonological skill influences. Found segmentation strongly correlated with attainment in reading and spelling at end of first year. Also found that letter name knowledge predicted both reading and spelling skill and showed interactive effect with segmentation. Finally, found that by end of second year, rhyming…

Explains that shared reading uses a familiar text to help children engage in the act of reading even before they can independently decode words. Describes how it works in a kindergarten classroom within a balanced literacy curriculum and the teacher's role in its effective use. (PA)

Describes the benefits of effective reading instruction for at-risk children at the preschool, kindergarten, and first grade levels. Notes that early reading delays are quickly magnified as children move through the early grades. Asserts that public education is the fundamental equalizer in the United States and that it enables children from poor…

Considers how public opinion and entire theories of teaching reading are based in the false Just So story--Just Sound Out, and you can read. Explains why sounding out is a handicap. Suggests a better alternative, teaching by recognizing words. (SG)

This short-term longitudinal study examined performance of 5- and 6-year-olds in early stages of reading on three phonological awareness tasks. Findings indicated that measures of phoneme awareness were the best concurrent and longitudinal predictors of reading skill, with onset-rime skills making no additional predictive contribution once…

Notes that preceding commentaries raise several issues, including which variables need to be controlled to demonstrate a specific relationship between phoneme-level skills and reading ability and whether prereaders can perform phonemic awareness tasks. Maintains that none of the commentaries casts doubt on the basic conclusion that phonemic-level…

Outlines the following teaching strategies to improve the reading fluency of beginning readers: paired reading, echo reading, mumble reading, chanting lists or stories, repeated and choral readings, memorization tasks, and phrase boundary marking. (MM)

Documents children's acquisition of the following critical aspects of alphabet knowledge: letter recitation, naming, printing, and association of letters with sounds and words. Finds that performance improved with age and at different rates for different tasks. Finds no sex differences. (SR)

A group of 30 nonreading kindergarten children who received 7 weeks of instruction in phoneme segmentation and letter names/sounds were assessed on segmentation and reading measures. They outperformed a language activities group, which received instruction in letter names/sounds and additional language activities, and a group receiving no…

The study compared the effectiveness and efficiency of concurrent and isolation-intermix instruction in teaching four preschool children to read common words in their environment. Concurrent instruction resulted in students learning conditional discriminations in fewer trials and minutes of instructional time suggesting the value of teaching…

Determines if children enrolled in different types of preschool programs (ranging from maturational to early formal reading) differed in their knowledge of print concepts. Finds that the type of program was not a deciding factor in acquiring prereading print knowledge. (RS)

The study found that revising basal reader stories to improve text coherence resulted in improved comprehension for hearing impaired readers. Findings suggest that current efforts to control readability through stringent syntactic guidelines may result in texts that are more difficult, rather than less difficult, for hearing impaired readers to…

Distinguishes four phases in the development of sight word reading: prealphabetic, partial alphabetic, full alphabetic, and consolidated alphabetic. Suggests that this system represents the regularities that underlie the written forms of English words that all learners must internalize to build a fully functioning sight vocabulary. (RS)

Discusses research that supports the view that early phonological awareness affects children's ability to exploit the alphabetic system, and so to develop a sublexical route from print to sound to meaning. Discusses implications for teachers. (RS)

Explores whether or not beginning readers of Chinese (first and third graders) activate phonological codes while reading Chinese characters. Finds that subjects used phonological codes while reading. (RS)