A study investigated the book handling and print concepts knowledge of 37 preschool children in a college day-care center. Subjects ranged in age from 2 to 5 years. As part of their normal day, the subjects were taken aside and a story was read to them. They were then asked questions about the physical make-up of the book, rules and concepts of…

A model of reading development was tested by examining preschool children's knowledge of print, their interactions with a teacher, and their parents' perceptions of children's attitudes toward printed materials. The central tenet of the tested model was its hierarchical notion of children's progress in learning to read, leading to the assumption…

Investigates the effects of four types of prereading activities on comprehension of Australian fifth grade students: (1) irrelevant tasks (control); (2) pictorial introductions to the subject; (3) content-directed questions; and (4) free-association to the passage's titles. Determines that, although the pictorial introduction group performed best,…

The product of a two-year study investigating the literacy behavior of nine kindergarten students and their classmates, this report first explains the impetus and the theoretical foundations for the investigation and describes its subjects and setting. It then presents the methodology and the data collected from several related studies: (1)…

This report gives a history of the 1979-80 segment of a continuing project that is designed to provide a theoretically based description of children's transition from prereading to reading, along with tools that teachers may use to assess children's emerging literacy abilities. The first chapter provides an introduction to the project, while the…

Educators suggest that children whose families have read to them during their preschool years acquire lexical and syntactic knowledge of sentence-level features typical of written narrative before they begin formal literacy instruction. To test this claim, to discern growth in this knowledge over time and experience, and to describe the lexical…