A combination of case study observation and mini-experimentation techniques were used to examine a number of issues of relevance in the study of the acquisition of beginning reading skills. Six children were divided equally among three instructional modes: phonics, whole word, and mixed. They were asked to decode and encode words, and their…

Controversies over the best way to teach word recognition in beginning reading instruction have raged for generations. The goal has been to acquire automatic skills for recoding written language into speech. At this time, a popular theory suggests that phonics is better than the look-and-say method; however the evidence does not support this…

To whet the curiosity and interest of teachers who may be frustrated with the reading vocabulary achievement of pupils, an informal study compared Piaget's cognitive development theory, recent brain research, and the reading process, and examined how the theory and research apply to reading instruction. The Gestalt Process Approach to teaching…

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…

The responses of 84 children (42 in kindergarten and 42 in first grade) while trying to identify sight words that were similar in sound (bowl/pole), similar in sound and shape (boat/boot), or dissimilar (cup/moon) yielded information about phonetic composition as a source of information by which beginning readers identify sight words. The…

While previous studies have investigated children's awareness of two units within words--syllables and phonemes, there is experimental evidence that children are also aware of intrasyllabic units (units intermediate in size between the syllable and the phoneme), and that these units may be useful for teaching phonological awareness and reading.…

The instruction provided by two beginning reading programs (the Ginn 720 and the Palo Alto 1973 reading programs) are analyzed and compared in this paper on the basis of such factors as phoneme-grapheme correspondence and phonics instruction, sight word learning, and the development of reading comprehension. The comparison focuses primarily on the…

A study examined the relationship between reading instruction method, sex of learner, word learning proficiency and reading achievement in the first grade. Subjects were 78 males and 88 females chosen from two white, middle class suburban schools, one having a sight vocabulary instruction program, the other a phonic basal program. Students were…

Three reading procedures for learning isolated words--whole-word, syllable-blending, and phonics-blending--were examined to determine which was the most effective for preschool children. The six preschool children in the study were divided into two groups to assess the effects of the length and number of different letters in a series of training…

Twenty first grade children were videotaped during their first six weeks of learning to read in a study of the modified synthetic phonics program and the four progressive stages of oral reading behavior (emergence, contextual, nonresponse, and postresponse). The approach used by the teacher emphasized learning new words through the concurrent…

Designed to add to the existing knowledge base concerning the saliency of features used by children to identify isolated words, a study examined whether the method of instruction influences the extent to which various features are used for word identification and recall. Subjects, 117 kindergarten students from a suburban Buffalo, New York, school…