Purpose: It is often assumed that phonological awareness only reflects children's phonological skill. However, orthographic representations have been found to be automatically involved during phonological awareness tasks, which we refer to as automatic orthographic activation. Although previous longitudinal neural studies have addressed how…

Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN) is commonly thought of as one of the best predictors of reading achievement when compared to phonological awareness and letter name knowledge (Norton & Wolf, 2012). However, only one previous study has demonstrated significant growth following a RAN intervention (Vander Stappen & Reybroeck, 2018). This…

Concept of word in print is the development of an understanding of how monosyllabic and multisyllabic words operate in print. Young children show evidence of this understanding when they are able to repeat a line of text while accurately pointing to each word as it is said. A small but robust line of work has examined the knowledge, skills, and…

The ability to recognize letter patterns within words as a single unit is important for fluent reading. This skill is based on previously established memory representations of common letter patterns. The ability to form these memory representations may be impaired in some poor readers, particularly readers with naming speed deficits (NSD). This…

A series of lessons designed to explain what the Initial Teaching Alphabet (i.t.a.) is and to prepare prospective teachers of i.t.a. materials and methods as thoroughly as possible is presented. The eight lessons of the course, for each of which a separate booklet is provided, include the following: (1) The difficulties of traditional orthography…

This guide will help teach phonemic awareness to Pre K-3 students. It presents phonemic awareness as a sophisticated branch of phonological awareness through interactive activities that allows the student to succeed in learning the sounds represented by the letters of the alphabet. The book is designed to provide easy-to-follow suggestions for:…

The pattern of errors of second grade pupils in reading isolated words was analyzed, particularly with respect to reversals of letter sequence and letter orientation. These occurred in significant quantity only among the poorer readers in the class. The two types of reversals were uncorrelated and, therefore, cannot reflect a single process.…

The advantages of teaching beginning reading with the use of the Initial Teaching Alphabet (i.t.a.) and some of the questions which are raised pertaining to its use are discussed. The difficulties which many children experience in learning to read with traditional orthography (T.O.) are pointed out. These include the variety of patterns for any…

Twelve first-grade children were tested on word-reading and automaticity of letter and word processing. Word-reading speed increased steadily during the year. Apparently, their ability to process letters automatically was acquired prior to the ability to read words rapidly and accurately. (Author/CP)

This paper discusses some psycholinguistic and psychological bases of learning to read in two apparently disparate writing systems, English and Chinese. As an alphabet, English orthography has "more reason than rhyme"; relational units and markers (e.g., "hens" and "hence") are important. The combinatory properties of…

Provides information concerning the value of letter names in the teaching of reading and spelling. Presents specific discussions about the importance of letter names to prereading phonics abilities, the phonemic values in letter names, and the use of letter names in word analysis, semantic word recognition, and semantic spelling. (MKM)

In discussing instructional approaches to reading, this book offers several definitions of reading and discusses teaching techniques, including early methods, the basal approach, and recent trends, among them the phonics approach, the linguistics approach, the language experience approach, the initial teaching alphabet, individualized reading,…

The history of three non-Latin based orthographies--Chinese, Japanese, and Korean--is reviewed in this paper. The characteristics of the three orthographies are examined regarding the ease of learning to read with these varied symbol systems. Attention is given to the incidence of reading disability in different orthographies, and research is…

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…