Second-grade pupils who were taught reading in the first grade with the Initial Teaching Alphabet (i.t.a.) were compared with pupils who were taught reading with traditional orthography (TO). Seventy students from two schools in Moline, Illinois, were divided into a control group (using TO) and an experimental group (using i.t.a.) and were matched…

The purpose of this brochure is to assist parents of young children to recognize opportunities in everyday life to help their young children to become good readers and to suggest ways in which parents can take advantage of these opportunities. It is recommended that, first of all, parents should develop a reading habit in themselves and fill the…

Assuming that although the pre-operational child generates syntactic utterances, it cannot be inferred that he can comprehend the process of analyzing or synthesizing words or utterances as specimens, it would follow that trying to teach pre-operational children to read by decomposing words or sentences, on the assumption that words and the…

Chapters in this book describe how the home and the general environment contribute language and concepts and thereby condition a child to react favorably or unfavorably toward school and reading. The causes of reading difficulties are discussed to show that physical and psychological as well as social and instructional interferences may be…

Primary teachers, aides, and volunteers participated in an inservice training program based on: prerequisites of reading; teaching materials and techniques; diagnostic tests of reading skills; beginning reading; and developing comprehension. Evaluative procedures included: (1) a pre and posttest on factual content, (2) showing videotape of a…

A word attack program that begins with phonics and incorporates various aspects of a linguistics approach is described in this paper. Regardless of the material that is used, there are 13 consonant sounds which are easier to learn than others: b, d, j, f, k, p, t, l, m, n, r, v, and z. W and h would be introduced next because in isolation they…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether: (1) a new basal reading series (N Series) contained a larger variety of sentence patterns in beginning reading materials than a traditional reading series (T Series); (2) the variety of language patterns was systematically increased in beginning reading materials within either series; (3) the T…

THE RELATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF THREE APPROACHES TO BEGINNING READING WAS STUDIED. THE THREE APPROACHES WERE (1) PITMAN'S INITIAL TEACHING ALPHABET APPROACH (ITAA), (2) A MODIFIED LANGUAGE ARTS APPROACH WITH TRADITIONAL ORTHOGRAPHY (LAA), AND (3) A BASIC READER APPROACH (BRA). TWO INTERRELATED PROBLEMS WERE ALSO TREATED IN THIS STUDY--(1) THE…

The effects of phonic blend training on word decoding were compared in two groups of 4-year-old children, one that was proficient at segmenting syllables into individual phonemes in terms of the Fox-Routh test and another group that did not have this proficiency. (BJG)

Reports on a study that examined the abilities of first and second grade pupils to read true and altered spellings of words they had either previously read correctly or had misnamed. (HOD)

Reflects on the possible factors that enabled the author's child to learn to read at the age of five. (MKM)

This study examined the differences in total number of eye movements, direction of the reading scan, and total scanning time of good and poor second-grade readers who were being taught reading by either the phonics or sight-recognition method. (HOD)

Studies the graphemic-phonemic associations that are formed during the acquisition and subsequent retention of beginning reading responses and evaluates the heuristic value of viewing the formation of these associations as a classical conditioning response. (HOD)

Describes developmental stages of beginning spelling and suggests three steps for becoming a better teacher of spelling, reading, and writing. (MKM)