One of the twelve exemplary programs summarized in the Introduction to Right to Read's "Effective Reading Programs: Summaries of 222 Selected Programs" (CS001934), this program attempts to raise the reading skills of inmates of the Sierra Conservation Center to the level needed for training in conservation work while in prison, or for…

This program, one of those included in "Effective Reading Programs...," is used as a supplementary program for over 400 first graders in 17 classes at eight elementary schools. The children, most of whom are white, come from middle-income families in a small city. The program was developed to strengthen the basic reading program by using…

This program, included in "Effective Reading Programs...," serves 879 first- and second-graders, plus one fourth-grade class. The students are predominantly middle-class whites living in a small city. The program is an initial reading program designed to complement any basal reading series. The instructional strategy is based on the…

This study investigated how reading begins in speech. The subjects were nonreading kindergarten children divided into a control group of 20 students and an experimental group of 20 students. Both groups had an equal amount of discrimination practice upon the same sentences prior to test for word identification. The sentences for the experimental…

Research findings concerned with the relationship between the child's oral language behavior and learning to read are described. A cognitive-biological approach to the child's perceptual system development is taken, and data are presented to support both the developmental point of view of language development and the point of view that the child…

Two experiments aimed at extending the principles of paired-associates learning transfer to the acquisition of reading skills are reported. Approximately 15 first graders were randomly assigned to each of the 10 treatment conditions. In the first experiment, four types of letter training were compared to two control conditions. The experimental…

The question of whether reading methods interact differentially with student sequencing abilities was investigated. One hundred and thirty-one children from three schools in Palo Alto, California, were given reading instruction using a linguistic approach (Palo Alto Reading Program), and 115 children from three Palo Alto schools used a whole-word…

Two widely used first-grade reading series, Ginn and Scott-Foresman, were analyzed in terms of six phrase-structure grammars in an attempt to discover frequencies for sentence types. The six grammars were noun phrase, verb phrase, verbal modifier, statements without verbs, interrogative, and statements with verbs. Categorial grammars were written…

The achievement of four groups of children as measured by the Stanford Achievement Test was compared at the end of the first, second, and third year of school. The four programs used were the initial teaching alphabet (i.t.a.), Words in Color (WIC), Phonetic Keys, and teacher-designed analytic programs. At the end of the first year there appeared…

The beginning reading progress of children may be linked to sentence structures used in reading textbooks and the syntax of the child's oral language. An investigation was made of the preprimers and primers of three major publishing companies and of Southwest Regional Laboratory for Educational Research and Development (SWRL) reading programs to…

Current research dealing with the importance of reading, various beginning reading programs, and reading and the disadvantaged child was surveyed. This was followed by an explanation of the DISTAR Reading Program, which was designed to teach reading to disadvantaged children. The remainder of the report described a study which was conducted to…

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the effect on first-grade reading achievement of completing a program designed to teach the names of the letters of the alphabet before beginning formal reading instruction. Information was sought on the differential effect of this program on either boys or girls of different levels of…

This study related the style of writing found in literature for children and the relative level of readability of this material. Cloze tests of readability on 10 passages from five juvenile biographies of Lincoln were given in 1 week to a hemogeneously grouped upper elementary school reading class (n=28) in suburban Detroit. The mean T-unit…

One class of first graders used Sullivan's Programmed Reading for the 1966 school year and continued in the program through the second grade. The first-grade teacher used the program again with her 1967 class. An evaluation was conducted of the use of programed reading for these two groups as compared with the use of Scott, Foresman's basal…

This study investigated (1) the difference, if any, between the achievement in reading readiness of younger kindergarten children (4 years 9 months to 5 years 1 month upon school entrance) and older children (5 years 5 months to 5 years 8 months at entrance), (2) whether kindergarten positively affects the reading readiness achievement of children…