First grade students practiced reading ten unfamiliar function words; half studied the words embedded in printed sentences and half studied the words in unstructured lists and then listened to sentences comprised of the words. Posttest measures revealed that those who studied the sentences learned more about the syntactic/semantic identities of…

Thirty-six nonreading children aged four and five years old participated in a study comparing the ease of learning words represented in traditional orthography (T.O.) and in three logographic systems: Carrier-Peak, Bliss, and Rebus. (The Carrier-Peak symbols, normally moveable abstract shapes, were converted to graphic form for the study.) The…

In an investigation of the degree to which children learn associations in the direction opposite to the one in which they were taught, 20 preschool children were instructed in letter-sound correspondences in one of two ways. One group was presented with the letter symbol and asked to produce the sound, while the other group was presented with the…

A sample of 15 good and 15 poor first-grade readers, selected on the basis of the teacher's classification, performance on the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test, Primary A, Form 1, and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, was individually taught five nonsense syllables by each of four teaching modality procedures: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and a…

A study was conducted to test the thesis that teaching word recognition skills in a manner compatible with the learner's auditory or visual modality preference would facilitate beginning reading instruction. A group of 62 students in two first grade classrooms was studied; one class stressed the presentation of words as whole units, the other…

A number of studies exploring how beginning readers acquire knowledge that enables them to spell words fairly accurately and to recognize words correctly and quickly as they are reading are described in this report. (The reported studies were designed to test hypotheses derived from a theory of printed word learning proposed by L. C. Ehri.) In the…

Reviews the major theoretical statements regarding the contribution of literature to reading development, noting that they fall into two interwoven strands: the notion of learning to read through literature, and learning to read literature. Evaluates the empirical evidence supporting the claim that literature plays an important role in learning to…

Presents current research about how children learn to read and addresses the implications of this body of research for instruction. Aids educators in reflecting upon their present instructional practices to ascertain whether they coincide with findings from existing research. (MG)

Investigates how teachers' perceptions related to the reading process by examining their early recollections of learning to read. Uses comparative analysis between reported positive and negative recollections, yielding highly significant findings related to the variables of setting, age, most significant other, and locus of control. (SR)

Concludes that the level of categorization from which a word is drawn affects its learnability as a sight word. (FL)

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…

Investigates the effect of corrective feedback on the capacity of preliterate children to learn explicit phonetic segmentation. (HOD)

A framework for a comprehensive theory of reading is presented in this paper. The framework consists of perceptual, semantic, and control systems. The perceptual and semantic spaces of the theory should not be confused with the terms "decoding" and "comprehension"; decoding and comprehension refer to ways in which those spaces…

Teaching children to read letters first is regarded by many theorists as the foundation on which the teaching of words should be based. To test this assumption, 26 nursery school children were presented four items (two letters and two words) in a paired associate learning paradigm. The subjects were randomly divided into two groups for the purpose…