The beginning reading progress of children may be linked to sentence structures used in reading textbooks and the syntax of the child's oral language. An investigation was made of the preprimers and primers of three major publishing companies and of Southwest Regional Laboratory for Educational Research and Development (SWRL) reading programs to…

Basal readers are supposed to be easy for children to read, but sometimes their language is so unnatural that it's more confusing than helpful. (MKM)

Presents results of a study of the phonological, morphological, and syntactical oral language patterns of disadvantaged children of New Orleans. Many of the findings are relevant to beginning reading instruction. (TO)

Children's mastery of reading skills would be facilitated if reading programs capitalized on children's already-developed oral language competence. Barriers against "reading for meaning" exist when the cues used for predicting in oral language are not present in the written language which confronts children; yet anaylses of four reading…

The relationship between first-grade reading achievement and selected experimental language measures was investigated. The measures selected for study were (1) number of T-units (communication units) spoken in an experimental situation, (2) mean length of T-unit, (3) ratio of subordinate clause length to T-unit length, (4) ratio of…

Phonological awareness is thought to become increasingly analytic during early childhood. This study examines whether the proposed developmental sequence (syllable[right arrow]onset-rime[right arrow]phoneme) varies according to the characteristics of a child's native language. Experiment 1 compares the phonological segmentation skills of English…

Intended for teachers and others having responsibility for shaping language policy in the schools, this collection of invited, original articles is based on the belief that a teacher's task is not to "teach" children language but, rather, to create an environment that will allow language learning to occur naturally. The book is divided into four…

The reading instruction experiment described in this report is based on the theory that, if a child learns to talk without formal instruction solely by being exposed to language and if written language is to be considered as an independent system, a child could learn to read at the same age and in the same way as he is learning to talk, solely by…

The experiment described in this report investigates two basic questions concerning beginning reading instruction to speakers of nonstandard dialects. 1--Will learning to read be facilitated if the primary reading material is phrased in the actual word patterns and grammatical structure used by the children in their oral speech? 2--Will learning…

The problem of teaching standard English reading and language skills to children who speak nonstandard dialects can be facilitated through a language program that distinguishes between "everyday talk" and "school talk," while recognizing the position of both types of speech. The instructional materials must be meaningful with respect to the…