The aim of the current study was to examine the effects of bilingualism on letter and category fluency tasks. Participants were 1,600 monolingual and bilingual children from three cities in Iran: Tehran (Persian monolinguals), Tabriz (Turkish-Persian bilinguals), and Sanandaj (Kurdish-Persian bilinguals). We separately presented nine Persian…

A case against using traditional orthography (T.O.) as a learning medium and in favor of using the Initial Teaching Alphabet (i.t.a.) is presented. The following points were noted: (1) Most children are taught to read as we and our ancestors before us were by an alphabet which is at least 1,000 years old and took its form from the convenience and…

Most early childhood teachers support breaking away from the letter-a-week method of teaching the alphabet but question how to achieve that goal. Concepts related to how young children learn the alphabetic principle are reviewed and successful strategies for teaching the principle are presented. (LB)

Notes that a major goal within the language arts block is learning to recognize and write the letters of the alphabet. Presents 4 reasons that have been suggested as to why early letter knowledge exerts such a strong influence over learning to read and write. Presents descriptions of 12 websites dealing with the alphabet. (SG)

This nontechnical guide for parents and teachers examines learning to read from infants' babbling to the fluent reading of children reading independently for pleasure. Chapter 1, "Baby Speaks," describes language development in infancy. Chapter 2, "Our Alphabet: Language by Ear and by Eye," presents the alphabetic system and…

In the traditional alphabet, 26 letters represent 40 different and distinct sounds of the spoken English language in transcription. This prevents a one-to-one phoneme-grapheme correspondence since some of the written symbols represent more than one sound. These inconsistencies in the writing system, recognized as the source of difficulty in…

Two independent pilot studies in Britain investigated the effect of the Initial Teaching Alphabet (i.t.a.) on the creative expression and verbal skills in written composition of young children. The Staffordshire study compared a normal week's free compositions written by 54 children using the traditional alphabet with the compositions of a similar…

A program to be used by teachers working with children at the stage of emergent writing, generally kindergarten and grades 1 and 2, and based on recognition of young children's development, is outlined. The project operates on the premise that children can independently learn to write by writing if they are immersed in the appropriate social and…