Provides a preliminary look at the syntactic complexity of primary grade reading materials commonly used for initial reading instruction. (RB)

Concludes that the sight method of teaching reading is discredited by recent research findings. (RB)

Reports and explains the results of a conference on how children learn to read and proposes some principles for teaching beginning reading. (RB)

A Russian method of teaching beginning reading using auditory discrimination of phonemes training was shown to be superior to two American methods. (JH)

The importance of reading in curriculum for gifted students is emphasized in the digest which also examines reading curriculum strategies. Highly able readers are seen to have needs for specific assistance in developing more complex skills in choosing books and materials for particular purposes, and in applying learning to real-life problems.…

This study surveyed all-day and half-day Ohio kindergarten teachers regarding their reading or reading readiness instructional practices. First grade teachers in the same schools assessed the preparation and experiences of their incoming students. A Chi Square analysis comparing all-day and half-day programs revealed more areas of similarity than…

Developed to provide supplementary instructional strategies for reading teachers at the kindergarten level, this booklet presents the instructional module for completing patterns, a component of the Comprehensive Reading Program of the Chicago Public Schools. After an overview of the module, activities are suggested for the following areas:…

Metalinguistic cognition is the ability to think about language, to comment on it, to produce it, to comprehend it, and to manipulate language as an object with many identifiable and functional parts. It appears that metalinguistic skill development is related to cognitive development and is dependent on metalinguistic awareness which runs…

This paper takes a critical look at the Commission on Reading report, "Becoming a Nation of Readers," to suggest some directions for future research. The paper analyzes some of the general statements made in the report and focuses in depth on three issues: motivation and reading, comprehension instruction, and emergent literacy. The…

Intended to help children learn phonics and to learn how to use phonics, this handbook is modeled on the 15th century hornbook. The handbook is divided into three parts: (1) "What Went Wrong?"; (2) "HOW to Teach Someone to Read by Beginning with Basic Phonics"; and (3) "Special Problems." Nineteen references and a…

To investigate the relationship between a kindergartner's prior experience with print and the child's scores on Marie Clay's Concepts About Print Test, a study examined 23 kindergarten students from an upper middle class neighborhood. A 27-item questionnaire was given to parents at the beginning of the school year, asking what their children knew…

The program described in this paper makes beginning reading an activity in which children could use all of their cognitive and affective abilities to experience the images and ideas within the piece. The introduction points out that children can become actively involved in reading by writing poetry because they are creating the reading material…

To test how phonemic awareness influences reading, two experiments were conducted in the northwestern part of England in which twenty pairs of children possessing phonemic awareness (pa+) and lacking phonemic awareness (pa-) and matched for reading and chronological age were compared. In the first experiment, the subjects' ability to detect…