The authors emphasize the importance of cultivating autonomous motivation for literacy in early childhood by supporting students' basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness while building foundational skills. Additionally, the authors highlight four key findings specific to early childhood (pre-K-2) literacy development:…

This narrative review discusses quantitative indices measuring differences between alphabetic languages that are related to the process of word recognition. The specific orthography that a child is acquiring has been identified as a central element influencing reading acquisition and dyslexia. However, the development of reliable metrics to…

A Russian method of teaching beginning reading using auditory discrimination of phonemes training was shown to be superior to two American methods. (JH)

Discusses scientific research on the orthography factor in literacy acquisition. First, an i. t. a. experiment was carried out in Britain, and the second study was a comparision of literacy acquisition in 14 different countries. (Author/RK)

Strategies children use when they recognize words were explored. To measure the effectiveness of two different methods of training children to attend to the critical features of letters, 40 first-grade urban children were presented two pairs of letters (similar and dissimilar) simultaneously or successively. Unexpectedly, it was found that with…

Summarizes the work of those seeking to analyze orthography and the experimental, historical, and cross-national data which bear on the behavioral effects of writing system characteristics. (Author)

Reversals in poor and normal second-grade readers were studied in relation to their whole phonological error pattern in reading real words and nonsense syllables. Error categories included sequence and orientation reversals, other consonants, vowels, and total error. Reversals occurred in quantity only in poor readers, with large individual…

This paper examines the letter recognition difficulties of 322 primary grade students with decoding problems. Each student was asked to name all of the lower case letters, which were presented in non-alphabetical order. Each response was accurately recorded to determine which letters were taken for others. All responses were then tallied, and an…

Examines a program in Denmark that uses metalinguistic games and exercises to stimulate preschool children's discovery of the phonological structure of language. Concludes that phonological awareness can be developed outside the context of the acquisition of an alphabetic writing system, and that this awareness facilitates subsequent reading and…