A study examined the developmental shifts in the importance of linguistic components of words to single word decoding. Subjects, 1200 children ages 6-7, 8-9, and 10-12.5 years who were the normative sample of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC), were tested using a word recognition test, the Reading Decoding Subtest of the K-ABC.…

Designed to measure children's abilities to synthesize concepts from several sources, this measure is based on the assumptions that children move from the concrete to the abstract, from specific to generic, and that the ability to synthesize and form new concepts is an important prerequisite to reading comprehension. Each form of the test is…

Suggests that perceptual problems may account for the difficulty young children experience in recognizing words. (RB)

Describes various games which provide drill for beginning readers. (RB)

Discusses the role of parents and teachers in preparing children for beginning reading. (RB)

Designed for use in the home, this booklet describes how someone can be taught how the alphabet works; that is, by decoding the ABC's into spoken language. Among the steps to decoding discussed in this booklet are these: (1) teaching the sounds of individual letters; (2) teaching the different sounds of the vowels; (3) sounding out little words;…

To avoid confusing children, a reading approach from the very beginning should stress logical relationships based on experiences. Drilling words, sounds, or even sentences should be avoided since these practices lead to deviant schemes. A lifetime scheme involves teaching a child a process. Children need to learn a process by which they can…

This book of supplemental exercises is one of a series of books designed to provide educational materials for students in addition to the instructional texts in the Adult Learning Skills Program. Exercises in this basic level book are for the language arts subject area. Course numbers and exercise topics are: 101 (directional words, similarities…

This book of supplemental exercises is one of a series of books designed to provide educational materials for students in addition to the instructional texts in the Adult Learning Skills Program. Exercises in this basic level book are for the language arts subject area. Course numbers and exercise topics are: 201 (sight words, long vowels, hard…

Large differences exist among individuals in their ability to process speech sounds within syllables and words, and this ability is crucial for reading and spelling alphabetically beyond a very elementary level. The conception that speech is made up of segments (phonemes) is natural to those who read and spell alphabetically, but arguably: (1)…

The purpose of this paper is to present a direct instructional strategy, which is based upon what is known about effective classroom instruction. After defining direct instruction in reading, research that discriminates effective teachers from less effective teachers is presented. The paper then discusses the five-step, teacher directiveness…

A study required children to tell and to dictate stories that were real and make believe, all about the same basic topic, as part of things people do when they "write a story." A further purpose was to explore the reading knowledge of children who are just beginning to read. Children's reading attempts for these stories were used to…

While vowels are not consistent at the single-letter level, they tend to be more consistent in letter clusters or higher order units. Therefore, a program designed to teach reading without resorting to teaching single-vowel mappings has been developed. The reading program involves teaching single consonants, selected whole words, and higher order…