After considering the advent of knowledge about prereading from a longitudinal perspective, this report then reviews the research on preschool children's attempts to read and offers a discussion of cross-sectional research on both prereading and beginning reading. The discussion is organized in terms of three hypothesized strands of prereading:…

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 research results showing that kindergarten children continue to progress in their knowledge about reading over summer vacations--without formal instruction. Contains a copy of the Letter and Word Reading Test, which was used in the study. (FL)

Preschool children's knowledge of printed words and letters was studied longitudinally, in order to achieve a definition and an ordering of reading readiness activities. Middle-class children were tested to determine what they knew about print, they were given word learning and word recognition tasks, and their parents returned questionnaires…

The development of four-year-old children's knowledge of letters and printed words was studied to determine if preschool children begin reading, and if so, how. A natural hierarchy of knowledge was noted. (MKM)

This report explains why reading story books to young children (an activity assumed to help in the acquisition of literacy, although there is no unambiguous evidence in support of this assumption) is likely to be important and reviews the evidence about the role it might play in literacy development. The first section of the report examines…

A model of reading development was tested by examining preschool children's knowledge of print, their interactions with a teacher, and their parents' perceptions of children's attitudes toward printed materials. The central tenet of the tested model was its hierarchical notion of children's progress in learning to read, leading to the assumption…

Supports the theory that poor school achievement by many minority group children is related to the nature of teacher-pupil classroom interaction and describes a new construct, the balance of rights in speaking and turntaking between teacher and students. (AEA)

Investigating the extent to which reading to children and book type affect kindergartners' ability to recall, write about, and read the text that their teacher has just read to them, a study examined the effects that the story reading techniques of six kindergarten teachers had on 52 of their students during three book reading sessions. On three…

A longitudinal study examined the contributions of early language ability, home characteristics, and emerging knowledge about literacy to children's later decoding and comprehension ability. The study followed 127 children from the beginning of kindergarten to the end of grade 3 (when 83 were left). Subjects attended schools in a small, rural,…

A study examined the relationships between cognitive tasks and social skills that are relevant to prereading or beginning reading instruction by observing lessons given to small groups of children. Four preschool children--one with many prereading skills and three with few skills--participated in the study. Student-teacher interaction that…

A study examined preschool children's awareness of literacy. Subjects included 18 children from 2 classrooms of prekindergarten children who lived in a black, inner-city neighborhood and attended a school that believed in providing formal reading and writing instruction in the prekindergarten year. Subjects were asked how they were learning, how…

Evidence from a nine-month longitudinal study of deaf children's early attempts at learning to read provides the construct for an instructional model that stresses that even though the children may have, at the least, a meager expressive sign language vocabulary, they can be lead successfully through the holophrastic or one-word stage of reading…