Japanese preschool children begin to read at home at age four without any formal instruction or reading readiness programs, and the development of their reading abilities in the preschool stage is mainly up to the parents. A new reading program will be needed for the sake of children with parents who are not sufficiently concerned about reading. Although the reading ability of preschool children today has become higher than ever before, we should not overlook the fact that there are still some children who do not read any letters upon entering elementary school. Since ability grouping or the double-promotion system is not accepted in Japanese education, an elementary school teacher necessarily encounters larger individual differences than ever before in his classroom, which in Japan usually contains an extraordinarily large number of pupils. Coping with the big differences is the main problem in Japanese reading instruction on which further and urgent strategies are essential. (Author)