Suggests that most countries using an alphabetic language system judge success in beginning reading as the ability to do tasks demonstrating mastery of the same set of skills, but that the types of tasks used to measure these skills and the number of skills tested vary from country to country. (FL)

Suggests that reading programs that attempt to teach reading before children have developed adequate problem solving skills may be responsible for producing children who learn not to read. (DD)

Examines the relationship between syntactic maturity of oral language and reading achievement of first-grade students and compares this aspect of language competency to several traditional factors of reading readiness. (FL)

Research investigating vocabulary and comprehension achievement, intelligence quotients, and reading error analysis indicates that dependence on within-word (intraword) characteristics is more important for beginning reading success than is reliance on between-word (interword) analysis. (CJ)

The author favorably reviews the "SUCCESS in Beginning Reading and Writing Program" developed by Dr. Anne Adams of Duke University. The two-hour instructional program is divided into four modules: phonics/spelling; content reading; writing language experience stories; and recreational reading. Program costs and ease of use are noted.…

Discusses experiments that provide information about the reading processes involved in mapping phonemes onto alphabetic symbols; suggests several techniques for helping children both to differentiate among the short vowel sounds and to associate sound and symbol. Focuses on the needs of beginning readers who are experiencing reading difficulties.…

Discusses four linguistic patterns of oral literature that are of special interest to reading teachers, suggests ways that oral literature can be used for skill instruction in beginning and remedial reading, and shows how oral literature can stimulate creativity. (ET)

Describes a bilingual open classroom program for kindergarten children in which the classroom environment is rich with printed language and children are introduced to reading by an individualized system they both enjoy and profit from. Tells how children "write" books, how phonics is introduced, and how reading is incorporated in a variety of…

Describes ERIC documents pertaining to the role of parents in preparing their children to read and the ways in which they can help shape and strengthen a school's reading program. (FL)

Findings from this study suggest that by the end of the first grade, children taught using "meaning emphasis" curricula shift towards increased use of graphic information when confronted with reading material in which words are harder to identify. (HOD)

Critiques an experiment by M. Arlin, M. Scott, and J. Webster (see EJ 206 153) in which their pictures as an aid to learning hypothesis contrasts with the focal attention hypothesis supported by research by H. Singer, S. J. Samuels, and J. Spiroff (see EJ 105 648). (MKM)

The experiment studied the differential effectiveness of two methods of blending instruction on the ability of prereaders to decode synthetic words. Findings indicated the superiority of auditory-visual training over auditory, with both methods significantly superior to practice on sound-letter association (the control group task). (RC)

Reviews the literature to address questions that school psychologists and teachers have regarding emergent literacy in kindergarten. Defines emergent literacy; examines the importance of reading to children; and discusses print awareness/concepts of print, knowledge of letter names, phonemic awareness, formal reading instruction, early readers,…

This is the first article in a three-part series on the use of CD-ROM storybooks, poetry collections, and writing programs to motivate beginning readers. This initial article discusses the usefulness of CD-ROMs for teaching young students in the emergent literacy stage. A sidebar explains how multimedia stimulates learners. (Author/LRW)

This article offers both a rationale and method for the implementation of a natural literacy program for preschool children with language disabilities. It reviews research on development of fundamental literacy skills and briefly describes extant approaches to facilitating literacy skills. Tenets of the natural literacy perspective are explained…