A small-group procedure for teaching consonant sounds was tested in two studies with rural kindergarten and first-grade students whose teachers had been trained to use the procedure by means of a videotape model and a live demonstration. In the first study, done at the end of the 1974-1975 school year, the kindergarten and first-grade participants…

Successful reading is a complex, interactive process in which the reader's experience and information are as important to comprehension as the content of the printed page. This article describes several reading processes, discusses the problems involved for the beginning reader, and indicates some implications for reading instruction. Five…

Reading teachers vary in their teaching methods for reading instruction, usually emphasizing either the meaningful functions (meaning) or the technical features (coding) of written language. This paper reviews literature on the meaning/coding dichotomy and focuses on a "cognitive clarity theory" that stresses linguistic awareness and…

This study was designed to determine whether the content of selected beginning reading textbooks is comparable in syntactic complexity to the oral language of normal first-grade children and whether there was a predictable progression of syntactic complexity within the textbooks examined. The ten samples were taken from the primary levles of the…

The beginning reading method explained in this book combines a phonics approach with a sight word/basal reader approach, a method which the author used during her many years in the classroom. The author has found that children can become independent readers in two to four months and may read from 10 to 200 books independently in the first year.…

This study tested the effectiveness of Teams-Games-Tournament (TGT) for teaching basic reading skills. TGT is a classroom management technique which uses cooperative student teams, instructional games, and interteam tournaments in a particular combination. Fifty-three third-grade students were randomly assigned to either a TGT or a control…

Although the middle class child may come to school with a fairly large and useful vocabulary, teachers must be concerned with the extension of that vocabulary beyond its present limits. While the language of the middle class child is probably not an important concern in the choice of reading methods or the selection of word lists, it does have…

Since, by the time they enter school, children have developed a major portion of their spoken language system by being immersed in language, it seems probable that they could also apply these rules to the orthographic system if they were immersed in reading. Thus, learning to read by reading would allow the general formation of rules that could…

Chapters of this book on diagnostic-prescriptive reading instruction examine such topics as defining reading, language and reading, reading comprehension, assessing student progress and needs, visual and auditory discrimination and perception, visual memory of words, decoding word symbols, primary reading, creating interest in reading, critical…

Designed to provide data establishing the effects of individualization, teacher directiveness, and learner support on reading achievement, this study utilized 118 first-grade classrooms representing 44 schools located in suburban, rural, city, and inner city areas. Measurement of the three dimensions of the classroom environment was achieved…

Despite recent efforts at compensatory education, thousands of children still go through first grade each year without learning to read. More often than not, these are children of the poor. The underlying assumption of this study is that the major attempt at educational compensation for disadvantaged children have failed because of fundamental…

This study examined the effects of two programs which differed in the methods they employed to develop reading readiness. The two methods represented were a language experience approach and a phonics approach. The subjects were children from kindergarten classes in two elementary schools in Flint, Michigan. All subjects were randomly assigned…

The program outlined in this guide was developed on the theory that an important factor in determining a child's success in reading is an enriched background of prereading educational experiences (in the areas of language, motor skills, auditory and visual perception, and self-image) which can be directed at home by parents. In this program, the…

Data from four of the Cooperative First Grade Studies (1964-1965) were reanalyzed for four first grade projects, (Fry, Hayes, Mazurkiewicz, and Tanyzer). These projects were selected because they compared the Initial Teaching Alphabet approach with traditional orthography-basal reader approaches. The focal point of this reanalysis was to study the…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of teacher expectations on first-grade reading achievement. Rankings of reading readiness were collected from 26 classroom teachers before and after falsified reading readiness scores were presented to them. From 536 first graders, 32 high socioeconomic status with low reading readiness status…