The conclusions and recommendations drawn from a 7-year study of the Initial Teaching Alphabet (i/t/a) made by the Reading Research Unit of London University are reported. The British research showed conclusively that traditional orthography (TO) is a major handicap for teachers and students of reading. Students taught with i/t/a made…

Forty first-grade classes were divided into four treatment groups to determine the effectiveness of three reading methods with low ability students. Treatment A subjects used the regular basal program. Treatment B subjects used the same basal program, with the low subgroup receiving additional instruction from remedial reading teachers. Treatment…

Pertinent findings from the combined analyses of results of the United States Office of Education First-Grade Reading Studies are presented. Suggestions for incorporating diagnostic findings into the classroom teaching of reading are presented. The first-grade studies demonstrate that the reading achievement of first- and second-grade children is…

A 2-year continuation of one of the 27 U. S. Office of Education First Grade Reading Studies is reported. Students in the linguistics approach were initially taught to read using the experimental edition of "A Basic Reading Series Developed upon Linguistic Principles" by Charles C. Fries and others. Students in the basal reader approach…

Skilled reading depends upon a multiplicity of perceptual, linguistic, and cognitive processes; inadequate development of one or more of these processes may in turn lead to reading difficulty. This report considers some of the processes that may be especially problematic for the young reader. After an overview in which skilled reading is described…

This study reveals that children from the age of four to six years are unable to segment meaningful sentences into component words. The experiment investigated three hypotheses of performance on a word-learning task for beginning readers and prereaders. Readers and prereaders were taught five words as oral responses, each word paired with a…

A small-group procedure for teaching consonant sounds was tested in two studies with rural kindergarten and first-grade students whose teachers had been trained to use the procedure by means of a videotape model and a live demonstration. In the first study, done at the end of the 1974-1975 school year, the kindergarten and first-grade participants…

Successful reading is a complex, interactive process in which the reader's experience and information are as important to comprehension as the content of the printed page. This article describes several reading processes, discusses the problems involved for the beginning reader, and indicates some implications for reading instruction. Five…

Reading teachers vary in their teaching methods for reading instruction, usually emphasizing either the meaningful functions (meaning) or the technical features (coding) of written language. This paper reviews literature on the meaning/coding dichotomy and focuses on a "cognitive clarity theory" that stresses linguistic awareness and…

This study was designed to determine whether the content of selected beginning reading textbooks is comparable in syntactic complexity to the oral language of normal first-grade children and whether there was a predictable progression of syntactic complexity within the textbooks examined. The ten samples were taken from the primary levles of the…

The beginning reading method explained in this book combines a phonics approach with a sight word/basal reader approach, a method which the author used during her many years in the classroom. The author has found that children can become independent readers in two to four months and may read from 10 to 200 books independently in the first year.…

This study tested the effectiveness of Teams-Games-Tournament (TGT) for teaching basic reading skills. TGT is a classroom management technique which uses cooperative student teams, instructional games, and interteam tournaments in a particular combination. Fifty-three third-grade students were randomly assigned to either a TGT or a control…

Although the middle class child may come to school with a fairly large and useful vocabulary, teachers must be concerned with the extension of that vocabulary beyond its present limits. While the language of the middle class child is probably not an important concern in the choice of reading methods or the selection of word lists, it does have…

Since, by the time they enter school, children have developed a major portion of their spoken language system by being immersed in language, it seems probable that they could also apply these rules to the orthographic system if they were immersed in reading. Thus, learning to read by reading would allow the general formation of rules that could…

Chapters of this book on diagnostic-prescriptive reading instruction examine such topics as defining reading, language and reading, reading comprehension, assessing student progress and needs, visual and auditory discrimination and perception, visual memory of words, decoding word symbols, primary reading, creating interest in reading, critical…