A reading program developed to teach the minimum set of skills which enable children to recognize words as rapidly as possible through direct instruction in left-to-right orientation, blending, rhyming, and sounds is described. The materials for the program consist of teacher presentation notebooks used by the teachers in working with small groups…

Eight approaches to the teaching of elementary reading are described briefly. The Executive Committee of the Department of Elementary-Kindergarten-Nursery Education of the National Education Association selected the approaches to be discussed. They include (1) Language Experience Approach by R. V. Allen, (2) Phonic Approach by Charles E. Wingo,…

A questionnaire was administered to 50 first-grade teachers who reported strategies used in teaching reading to 1,145 Mexican-American, Black, and Anglo children in three school districts in Texas. Seven null hypotheses were tested. It was concluded that (1) reading instruction is delayed with Mexican-American children; (2) on the average, 68% of…

A functional prediction scheme was sought for use in kindergarten which would have good predictive power for future reading achievement and be easy and quick to administer and score, inexpensive, and conducive to classroom use. A group of 21 kindergarten children was tested for reading readiness, intelligence, and psycholinguistic ability. Their…

Dialects have features of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation that distinguish them from other varieties of a language; they exist in all languages and occur when members of one group communicate more among themselves than they do with speakers of another group. Black English vernacular (BEV) is a fully formed linguistic system with its own…

The purpose of this paper was to test the hypothesis set forth by Farnham-Diggory (1967) and Denner (1970) that problem readers lack representational and syntactic competence. A random sample of 72 first graders, stratified by sex and social class, was given the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test and the Farnham-Diggory tasks. An analysis of variance…

A 40-item nonsense word list was administered to 27 first-graders who had been taught letter-sound correspondences in isolation. The results displayed a succession of stages through which subjects apparently passed. At the second stage, subjects could sound letters but not blend the sounds into words; at the third stage, subjects could sound some…

Recent research supports the view that the beginning reader's comprehension is aided by a similarity between written materials and the child's own oral language production. The content of the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Mod 2 Kindergarten Storybooks was analyzed by surface linguistic form class and compared to an analysis of 5.5- to…

The purpose of this study was to isolate some independent variables that may be directly related to beginning reading ability. The study was conducted in two phases: the piloting and revision of four perceptual tests involving the ability to manipulate sequential stimuli within or between the visual and auditory modalities; and the administration…

This science-oriented reading readiness text is provided in three versions: English, Spanish and Navajo. It consists of large black-and-white drawings of birds, animals and insects familiar to the southwestern U.S. One picture is provided on each page, with the name of the animal printed in large type beneath the picture. The three booklets are…

This paper represents an attempt to study the graphemic-phonemic associations that are formed during the acquisition and subsequent retention of beginning reading responses and to evaluate the heuristic value of viewing the formation of these associations as a classical conditioning process. Two experiments--one on first graders and one on first…

This volume describes and discusses the areas in which children must develop in order to learn to read, emphasizing the recognition of the different rates of development for various children. Contained in this material are suggestions regarding the role of the classroom teacher in assessing the needs of the young child and in planning and…

The purposes of this study were to determine (1) if it is possible to predict which children will develop word recognition deficits based on levels of articulation proficiency and auditory discrimination ability; (2) the effect of two different instructional approaches for beginning reading, phonics, and whole-word approach; and (3) if first grade…

Some of the research dealing with pre-first-grade reading is discussed in relation to an experimental program with four-year-olds and pre-first-grade reading. The author states that little factual information exists for this topic and the majority of existing reports deal primarily with Head Start. Some of the shortcomings of reports on early…

An explanation of the child's mind and his language, stated in terms of the nature of the learner, is presented in this book. The authors ask teachers to think about the competence of the child and try to discover what he must know to be able to read. They ask teachers to examine the nature of the learner--what he knows that enables him to learn…