The purpose of this experimental study was to examine the contribution of phoneme awareness training and orthography to the learning of new vocabulary words by partial alphabetic phase readers. Hypotheses included: Preschoolers taught to phonemically segment words with letters would outperform those trained without letters on an invented spelling…

This study was designed to explore how 3-year-olds responded to questions about print, reading, writing, and book knowledge. Nine urban black and eight rural white preschoolers were interviewed and questioned about various literacy concepts. They also completed seven print awareness, reading, writing, and book knowledge tasks. The study found that…

A cross-cultural study examined preschoolers' knowledge of elementary components of the writing system. Subjects were 41 Chinese and 44 American preschool students between the ages of 2 and 4. The students were presented with sets of cards depicting familiar objects, capitalized English letters, and Chinese characters and were asked to turn each…

This study examined the effects of observational learning on preschoolers' attention to print, use of a questioning technique, and knowledge of the alphabet. Participating were 13 boys and 13 girls from a day care center at a community college, with a mean age of 4.3 years. Children were randomly assigned to one of three training conditions, each…

Preschool children's association of the correct name with a clearly identified graphic form during an alphabet naming process is examined in this study. Subjects were 139 children (ages 2, 3, 4, and 5 years) who were asked individually to identify 52 cards, each with a single upper or lower case letter printed on it. Analysis of data was based on…

This brief essay argues that the best way to improve student achievement is to increase parental teaching of children prior to school entry. The essay is accompanied by an annotated bibliography summarizing 14 empirical studies which document a significant positive relationship between parental teaching and student achievement. It is contended…

A study focused on children's alphabet knowledge and name writing ability to investigate between-group differences. Subjects were 22 children (mean age 57 months) in a private preschool located in a suburban, predominantly upper-middle income area and 12 children (mean age 56 months) in a private, subsidized day care center situated in a…

A study was made of similarities and differences in parent-child interaction in two contexts: a book-reading activity and a home computer activity involving an alphabet program. A total of 20 children 3 years of age and their parents (10 children with mothers, 10 with fathers) were videotaped in two 12-minute sessions of each activity. A variety…

This study compared the concepts of oral and written language of 4-year-old, preschool children from low- and middle-class homes. Subjects were 64 children from 3 preschools serving families at poverty level, and 3 preschools serving middle-income families. Children's understanding of the function of print was measured by three tasks: recognizing…