This Topical Bibliography and Commentary examines recent studies on phonological awareness, finding the evidence conclusive that teaching phonological awareness to young children greatly facilitates the reading process. Researchers have studied problems children experience in reading for many years. The focus of research during the 1990s has been…

The United States government's National Reading Panel (NRP) "Put Reading First" report points to phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension as the major building blocks for reading success. This booklet seeks to demonstrate clearly and explicitly how the Harcourt Reading Program, "Trophies," links…

This focused newsletter features articles about reading, reading research, and teaching reading. The newsletter's lead article, "The Challenge of Improving Reading," enumerates the problems that schools and families can encounter when trying to raise student performance in reading. Another article in the newsletter, "The Longest…

A "national cry" has gone out that phonics and phonemics awareness must again be taught. True literacy involves much more than merely reading. Students need to be equipped to think, write, spell, and express themselves orally and on paper. This helps them to clarify their own thinking. The English alphabet is a sound/symbol system, not a…

A study examined children's reading difficulties at the early grade levels and explored how federal and state governments are responding to this critical education problem. Sections of the study address: background issues in reading achievement; federal response to improve poor reading achievement; state issues in early reading achievement;…

This position paper considers the complex relation between phonemic awareness and reading. The paper seeks to define phonemic awareness (although there is no single definition), stating that it is typically described as an insight about oral language and in particular about the segmentation of sounds that are used in speech communication. It also…

Syntheses of reading research conducted by the National Research Council (1998) and more recently by the Congressionally-Commissioned National Reading Panel (2000) provide ample evidence of the skills, experience, and knowledge children need to become successful readers in an alphabetic writing system. This research makes clear that children must…

This report describes a program for improving phonemic awareness skills in kindergarten students. The targeted population consisted of kindergarten students in two elementary schools. The schools are located in the northern suburbs outside a large Midwestern city. The problem of poor phonemic awareness skills was documented with a parent survey, a…

This book examines the studies of leading researchers who have testified in various hearings and promoted policy and legislation on behalf of skills-emphasis learning, especially those financed by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The book not only identifies each claim, it also analyzes the research that backs…

Intermediate decoding refers to word analysis skills that are beyond a beginning, one-syllable level as described in an earlier NetNews issue, yet are just as important for building adult level reading proficiency. Research from secondary settings indicates that struggling readers in middle school or high school programs often read between the…

Evaluates some of the 100 different teaching approaches to beginning reading and reading theory. (Author/RB)

Original version of this paper presented during the 1970 Linguistic Institute in Columbus, Ohio. (VM)

Two general topics are discussed: (1) The sequence of events that transpire in one second of reading, to suggest the nature of the processes that link them; and (2) the relation of this description to the acquisition of reading. Contains a list of 71 references. (RB)

Teachers must recognize that, according to every reliable linguistic survey of the French-speaking Caribbean area, all social classes, except recent European immigrants, speak French Carribbean Creole, not Standard French, as their first language. (JM)

Lecture given before the Annual Conference and Course on Reading (23d, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa., July 10-21, 1967).