Examines reading and spelling errors made by children learning Arabic within a developmental framework. Finds that errors in reading and spelling persisted throughout primary school, pointing to the difficulties involved in mastering the Arabic written language. Notes that misreadings involved mainly diacritics whereas misspellings were related to…

Explored the impact of parental involvement and of public libraries on Head Start children's emerging literacy skills. Found differences in the amount of parental involvement in literacy activities and the types of activities. Library use was minimal for fear of damaging books, transportation problems, or lack of time or effort. Suggested…

Argues that literacy teachers should take letter play seriously in conjunction with invented spelling to help their students learn how letters and sounds relate. (RS)

Interviewed 49 Scottish preschoolers about their understanding of literacy and numeracy. Found that children of this age group often held erroneous or conflicting beliefs about their ability to read or count. Subjects indicated some understanding of the generalities of story reading and counting before they could actually perform either activity.…

Describes how a first grade classroom is organized around activities using writing, basals, real books, and working with words to meet the needs of a diverse group of children. (MG)

Provides a brief summary of whole-language theory and offers suggestions for its application in adult education settings. Maintains that when instructional techniques rooted in whole-language theory are used with adult beginning readers, learning is more meaningful and success can be dramatic. (SR)

Describes and illustrates a developmental approach to reading assessment. Presents four developmental levels of learning to read: emergent reading, beginning reading, consolidation, and reading to learn new concepts. Explains procedures for assessing aspects of each level. Provides examples of how oral reading miscues, reading rate, and…

Examines effectiveness of project designed to increase inner-city children's opportunities to interact with storybooks in their classrooms and at home. Finds that 75% of children interacted with storybooks at a higher level of emergent reading at the end of the project, and 10 of the 28 children attempted to track print at postassessment, whereas…

Explains new research findings about how children learn letter-sound correspondences, relates the findings to whole-language reading instruction, and outlines a theory for how children acquire the letter-sound system without direct instruction in phonics. Describes recent findings on phonological processes involved in learning letter-sound…

Presents current research about how children learn to read and addresses the implications of this body of research for instruction. Aids educators in reflecting upon their present instructional practices to ascertain whether they coincide with findings from existing research. (MG)

Attempts to enhance classroom teachers' awareness of potential problems that can result when discrepancies exist between children's entry schema and the schema which undergirds the school's instructional program. Discuses a case study of a child who became at risk for reading failure when a mismatch developed between the child's internalized…

Three experiments on vowel decoding involving primary school children partially tested an interactive model of reading acquisition. The model suggests that children begin learning to read by establishing orthographic recognition units for words that have phonological underpinning that is initially at the onset-rime level but that becomes…

Describes LETTERLAND, a unique teaching model that blends a structured phonics approach with whole-language teaching and is widely used in British classrooms as an initial approach to literacy as well as in special needs contexts. (HTH)

Examined relationships between teachers' perceptions of literacy acquisition and kindergartners' involvement in literacy events and the quality and quantity of classroom literacy materials. Teacher interviews and classroom observations indicated that children in emergent literacy classrooms participated in significantly more literacy events than…

This article presents a five-step sequence for teaching children with disabilities to read pictures. Steps are sequenced for content and complexity of picture, student response requirement, and language demands. They include: (1) identify person, (2) identify object, (3) identify person and object, (4) identify action, and (5) identify sequence.…