Acknowledging that while it is difficult to suggest specific instructional strategies for accommodating differing adult beginning readers' (ABR) psychosocial behavior, this paper offers appropriate instructional principles based on the educational and social needs of the ABR. The principles presented are as follows: (1) teachers should help adults…

Twenty children between six and nine years of age and of average or above average intelligence were used in a study to determine whether methods that restrict pupil participation to visual attention or oral response are of more or less value in attempts to recognize words than methods that involve activity with the hands, such as tracing or…

First grade students practiced reading ten unfamiliar function words; half studied the words embedded in printed sentences and half studied the words in unstructured lists and then listened to sentences comprised of the words. Posttest measures revealed that those who studied the sentences learned more about the syntactic/semantic identities of…

DATA RELEVANT TO THE FOLLOWING THREE QUESTIONS WERE DRAWN FROM 27 INDIVIDUAL STUDIES COMPRISING THE COOPERATIVE RESEARCH PROGRAM IN FIRST-GRADE READING INSTRUCTION--(1) TO WHAT EXTENT ARE VARIOUS PUPIL, TEACHER, CLASS, SCHOOL, AND COMMUNITY CHARACTERISTICS RELATED TO ACHIEVEMENT IN FIRST-GRADE READING AND SPELLING, (2) WHICH APPROACH TO INITIAL…

Various aspects of beginning reading programs in six countries are discussed in the five articles in this booklet. In the first article, the principles and methods of instruction used in Sweden are described and trends in beginning reading instruction are noted. The importance of a verbal environment, teacher competence, and early diagnosis in…

Children learning to read are often exposed to "stories" which are really little more than lists of sentences. A good story has at least continuity and conflict which may be analyzed in two ways: story grammar (analysis of setting and plot) and plans and beliefs (analysis of the plans and beliefs of the characters, including the reader's…

Designed as a practical guide for teachers, this book briefly reviews and discusses various aspects of phonics. Phonics is defined, and the part phonics has played in the teaching of reading in the past is considered. The use of phonics in teaching reading at the present is examined in relation to currently available research on various approaches…

The Pre-reading Skills Program (PRS) was developed at the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning. Research on prereading skills was conducted from 1966 to 1969. The developmental period, 1970 to 1974, included piloting and field testing instructional materials, teachers' manuals, assessment instruments, and a management…

This study investigated the relation between field independence/field dependence (FI/FD) and reading success. One hundred kindergarten children from a predominantly white, middle-class community were administered a Portable Rod and Frame Test as a measure of cognitive style. The upper and lower 27% were identified and designated Field Dependent…

This paper presents a model for classifying initial approaches to the teaching of reading. The model consists of three dimensions: the degree of structuring of the program, the sequence of gradation of reading units, and the kind of symbol system used in the initial stages of reading instruction. The degrees of structuring refers to programs such…

This book, intended for use by inservice teachers, preservice teachers, and parents interested in open classrooms, contains three chapters. "Beginning Reading in an Open Classroom" discusses language development, sight vocabulary, visual discrimination, auditory discrimination, directional concepts, small muscle control, and measurement of…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the Distar Reading and Language Program as a method for beginning reading instruction. The subjects in the Distar group were 24 prekindergarteners, 60 kindergarteners, and 68 first graders. There were 24 children in the control prekindergarten group, 61 in the kindergarten, and 72 in…

Word frequency was determined for library books that primary-grade children selected for free reading. A survey of librarians determined which books these children selected. This list was reduced to 80 books through evaluations by elementary school teachers. A computer analysis of each word in these books revealed 105,280 running words. When…

While a great deal of attention has been directed to the potential value of using symbol systems other than the traditional 26-letter alphabet in the early stages of reading instruction, little attention has been paid to the potential value of using rebuses. In a linguistic sense, rebuses are symbols which represent entire words or parts of words;…