Describes the concept of phonemic awareness and offers suggestions to classroom teachers on how to enhance phonemic awareness in their students. (PRA)

Two experiments studied the role of phonemic information in children's comprehension during silent reading. A sentence acceptability task indicated that readers required more time to read and comprehend sentences with word-initial phonemes (the "tongue-twister effect") than control sentences. When the first task was added to a digit…

Discusses conventional theory of speech and attempts to prove that it is implausible and likely to mislead the reading researcher or teacher who follows it. Offers and supports an alternative theory that is more plausible and less conventional which argues that phonologic structures developed early in life provide a basis for reading…

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development concentrates on three questions: how children learn to read English and other languages; which skill deficits and environmental factors impede reading development; and which instructional approaches work best with particular children. Research indicates that deficits in developing…

Three studies examined linguistic factors influencing preschooler's phonemic awareness task performance. Results indicated no performance differences between fricatives and stops. Subjects were more likely to mistakenly judge that syllables began with a target phoneme when the initial phoneme differed from the target only in voicing than when it…

Presents four informal assessments that elementary teachers can use to compare students' spelling progress to typical midyear benchmarks. The assessments, which target K-6 students, emphasize alphabet recognition, phonemic awareness, attitude and consciousness about spelling, and spelling growth through writing samples. The paper includes a…

Focuses on the general auditory hypothesis and its special form as proposed by P. Tallal and her colleagues. Reviews evidence for these hypotheses and finds it to be either purely correlational or flawed by misinterpretation of results and/or lack of necessary experimental controls. Concludes deficits in speech perception often observed in…

This study examined differences between two subgroups of third grade dyslexics (n=72), either phonological dyslexics (lower phoneme awareness and expressive language) or delayed dyslexics (slower at processing printed words and letters but not at rapid automatic naming). Re-testing in fourth grade revealed that this classification produced…

This study examined young children's growth, over time, in phonics knowledge, word-recognition, and fluent oral reading. Correlations and causal relationships among these variables were explored in an attempt to identify the foundational knowledge and skills needed for reading fluency. Measures of phonics knowledge, word-recognition development,…

Auditory perceptual learning has been proposed as effective for remediating impaired language and for enhancing normal language development. We examined the effect of phonemic contrast discrimination training on the discrimination of whole words and on phonological awareness in 8- to 10-year-old mainstream school children. Eleven phonemic contrast…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 created the Reading First program to help ensure that all students could read at or above grade level by the end of grade 3. The program promotes practices recommended by the National Reading Panel for early reading instruction, highlighting essential components of reading instruction. As required by the…

Preventing reading difficulties in the early grades has been a topic of interest for more than a decade. Research has clearly delineated the components needed for early literacy programs to be effective in teaching nearly all children to learn to read. Teacher educators have a responsibility to ensure that candidates gain extensive knowledge about…

This paper proposes a multimedia English learning (MEL) system, based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and mastery theory strategy, for teaching students with the aim of enhancing their English phonetic awareness and pronunciation. It can analyze phonetic structures, identify and capture pronunciation errors to provide students with targeted advice…

Response to intervention (RTI) is characterized as a logical science of decision making that has applicability for early childhood, particularly in the context of multitiered intervention models. This study examined the utility of using curriculum-based early literacy measures as screening tools and for evaluating whether growth in early literacy…

Although research documents a key contribution of print skills to early literacy, vocabulary and other language skills also provide an important foundation. Focusing on a sample of several hundred low-income children in 16 urban schools that were implementing literacy interventions, 1st-grade predictors of literacy development were traced over…