This paper offers seven practical suggestions to teachers who are teaching phonics to hard-to-teach children (the learning disabled, the educable mentally retarded, slow learners, and the culturally disadvantaged) and who are not experiencing the success they desire. The suggestions are made under the following topics: (1) cumulative learning and…

Noting that the idea of reading as a natural language communication process has been well established by research, this paper identifies learning strategies and suggests teaching methods for developing the young child's awareness of the communication nature of reading. The paper concludes that learning strategies based on imitation, drawing, and…

A variety of factors related to beginning reading in Sweden are considered in this paper. Among the topics discussed are the following: age of school entrance and beginning reading, factors related to school maturity and reading readiness, the importance of appropriate teaching techniques in the critical beginning stages of reading instruction,…

A study originally involving 56 children from four schools was undertaken to observe the development of children's oral language and concepts of print during the kindergarten year using the Record of Oral Language (ROL) and the Concepts about Print (Sand) tests. In addition, the Sand test was administered early in the first grade to the available…

To support young children in bringing all of their resources to bear on constructing meaning from print, teachers must be aware of how children learn, must make use of a variety of learning materials, and must carefully prepare the contextual setting in which children move into reading. Teachers should focus on planning a classroom reading…

A study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of six approaches to beginning reading instruction (basal, linguistic, phonic, programed reading, i/t/a, and unifon) in schools serving educationally disadvantaged children and to determine the effectiveness of lay aides in project classrooms. Subjects were approximately 4,000 pupils in primary…

The Oakland County, Michigan, first-grade study of the effectiveness of three approaches to beginning reading was extended to the second and third grades to investigate differences in their effects on reading and related language development. Each of 11 research teams chose three classrooms which used either the Initial Teaching Alphabet approach…

Six children from one first-grade classroom were videotaped 18 times over a seven-month period, while reading aloud complete stories. Analysis of the first 50 miscues and the last 50 miscues in both new and familiar materials read by the children yielded profiles of each child's oral reading strategies. The major findings indicated that these six…

The inconclusive results of research comparing beginning reading methodologies in the 1960s led many schools to change their approaches to beginning reading instruction. In the 1970s the focus has shifted from the belief in a single method as superior for all children to the attempt to match methodology to the needs of individual children. A…

The responses of 84 children (42 in kindergarten and 42 in first grade) while trying to identify sight words that were similar in sound (bowl/pole), similar in sound and shape (boat/boot), or dissimilar (cup/moon) yielded information about phonetic composition as a source of information by which beginning readers identify sight words. The…

As part of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, a study was devised to test the project's materials and procedures. Selected by a pretest, four kindergarten children, with no prior reading instruction, were taught the same reading content using the initial teaching alphabet for a…

As part of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, the second phase of a preliminary study was devised that modified the pretest, the instructional modes and format, the sequence and amount of information presented in the instructional sessions, and the procedures for testing and…

The 21 essays in this collection consider the conditions under which reading is most effectively taught and learned. Topics deal with the ways in which a desire to read can be "caught" by children in their early years; the case for humanistic education; the need for changes in people's attitudes toward learning and teaching; ways of…

This book reviews the research literature relevant to the language experience approach to the teaching of reading, in which instruction is based upon the use of reading materials created by writing down children's spoken language. The first major section provides a narrative review of the research studies, organized, for the most part,…

Tests for prereading skills of Israeli kindergarten children were developed and tested on a wide range of socioeconomic levels. Based on studies in the United States and Israel, tests were developed for letter matching, rhyming, sound matching, and letter recognition. Results from 178 kindergarten children led to a division of the letter matching…