The purpose of this study was to determine whether: (1) a new basal reading series (N Series) contained a larger variety of sentence patterns in beginning reading materials than a traditional reading series (T Series); (2) the variety of language patterns was systematically increased in beginning reading materials within either series; (3) the T…

THE RELATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF THREE APPROACHES TO BEGINNING READING WAS STUDIED. THE THREE APPROACHES WERE (1) PITMAN'S INITIAL TEACHING ALPHABET APPROACH (ITAA), (2) A MODIFIED LANGUAGE ARTS APPROACH WITH TRADITIONAL ORTHOGRAPHY (LAA), AND (3) A BASIC READER APPROACH (BRA). TWO INTERRELATED PROBLEMS WERE ALSO TREATED IN THIS STUDY--(1) THE…

The effects of phonic blend training on word decoding were compared in two groups of 4-year-old children, one that was proficient at segmenting syllables into individual phonemes in terms of the Fox-Routh test and another group that did not have this proficiency. (BJG)

Reports on a study that examined the abilities of first and second grade pupils to read true and altered spellings of words they had either previously read correctly or had misnamed. (HOD)

Reflects on the possible factors that enabled the author's child to learn to read at the age of five. (MKM)

This study examined the differences in total number of eye movements, direction of the reading scan, and total scanning time of good and poor second-grade readers who were being taught reading by either the phonics or sight-recognition method. (HOD)

Studies the graphemic-phonemic associations that are formed during the acquisition and subsequent retention of beginning reading responses and evaluates the heuristic value of viewing the formation of these associations as a classical conditioning response. (HOD)

Describes developmental stages of beginning spelling and suggests three steps for becoming a better teacher of spelling, reading, and writing. (MKM)

Explores the approach to reading which emphasizes reading within a total language context and concludes that teacher training should stress awareness of the child's general language situation and should discourage reliance on word-skill material. (JM)

Discusses the relationship of cognitive development or thinking skills to language development and beginning reading. (MKM)

In this article the stages of learning how to read are outlined, and successful methods of teaching reading are described. (JD)

Data from the application of word reading, letter recognition, memory and classification tasks to preschool children suggest that word learning ability is more closely tied to cognitive development than is alphabet knowledge and that reading readiness assessment might profit from applying a word learning task. (MB)

Reports on a study investigating the contributions of visual factors dependent upon the use of symbols as intermediary units and concludes that perceptual factors may play an important role in the use of Chinese characters as intermediaries in introducing reading. (JM)

Results of a study of early reading responses of young children in a Finnish preschool challenge the belief that grapheme-phoneme regularity is a critical factor in beginning reading. (JM)