Study examines first-grade students' growth in oral reading fluency as predicted by their kindergarten letter-naming and letter-sound fluency using growth curve analysis. Results reveal that kindergarten letter-naming fluency uniquely contributed to the prediction of first-grade reading growth. Findings also reveal that Native American and…

Examines whether mnemonic strategies can be successfully applied to the learning of a non-Roman foreign-language alphabet. Students were given materials presenting Russian letters and their English sounds on each page. Beneath each letter was a mnemonic. Findings indicate that these strategies enhance the learning speed of non-Roman…

Describes an art activity that enables beginning art students to practice their skills and techniques using watercolor as a medium. States that the students use paint, paper, and an inexpensive stencil set of the alphabet. Explains that students create a symmetrical design that fills the sheet of paper. (CMK)

Four groups of children in first grade were compared on early literacy tasks. Children in three of the groups were bilingual, each group representing a different combination of language and writing system, and children in the fourth group were monolingual speakers of English. All the bilingual children used both languages daily and were learning…

Frontal lobe patients reproduced a sequence of capital letters or abstract shapes. Immediate and delayed reproduction trials allowed the analysis of short- and long-term memory for time order by means of suitable Markov chain stochastic models. Patients were as proficient as healthy subjects on the immediate reproduction trial, thus showing spared…

Three experiments were undertaken to examine second and fifth grade Telugu-speaking children's awareness of phonological and orthographic properties of familiar Telugu words. Experiment 1 focused on the strategies the children used in completing word fragments. Experiment 2 examined the children's ability to judge and generate rhyming words, and…

The dictionary of stems, roots, and affixes for the Blackfoot language provides, for each entry, information on the item's morphological type (e.g., noun stem, verb stem, root), subclassification if relevant, English index, and certain diagnostic inflectional forms (full words or sentences), each with an English translation. In addition, entries…

This guide to conversational language in Yup'ik Eskimo is designed to accompany audiotape recordings (not included here). It contains the phrases and sentences used in 30 lessons. A brief introduction comments on the format of the text. Lessons are on these topics: Yup'ik phonology and common brief expressions; exclamations; greetings and…

Three activity booklets are presented for implementing Project EAGLE, an enrichment program for gifted and talented kindergarten children. The first activity booklet contains a poem by J. D. Evans titled "In Search of the Xanthus," which describes the search for an imaginary beast that leaves an "X" on the spot where it used to be. The second…

A teacher educator describes his teaching experience in China and his finding that the Western behaviorist, alphabetic, linear mode of thinking has been widely adopted in education in that traditionally ideographic culture. The contrasting relationships of language, thought and behavior in the American and Chinese cultures is examined, and it is…

A study assessed the role of orthographic structure in college students' perceptual recognition and judgment of letter strings. Lexical status, word frequency, bigram frequency, log bigram frequency, and regularity of letter sequencing were orthogonally varied across a series of experiments. Six-letter words and their anagrams were used as test…

An instructional guide to written Mauritanian Arabic contains 20 lessons, each presenting one or more letters of the Arabic alphabet and script. Graded exercises are included. The course is intended to be taught as the first stage in the Mauritanian Arabic training program for Peace Corps volunteers. The manual is entirely in Arabic. (MSE)

Visual acuity as a function of target position and density was measured in a letter recognition task. A homogeneous pattern of equally-spaced elements was tachistoscopically exposed, where the target was never located at the boundaries of the pattern. The target was marked with a spatial cue to control attentional processes. With such a spatial…

Efficient handwriting plays an important role in strengthening virtually all other school skills. One method of teaching handwriting involves personifying the letters in order to make writing more interesting, meaningful, and fun. The first lesson shows students the correct sitting position and the proper way to hold a pen. The next lesson has the…

Recognizing that learning to spell is a complex, active process of discovery, this book presents some suggestions for the teaching of spelling that may be incorporated into different types of language programs and adapted to suit the needs of children with a range of spelling abilities. Following the introduction, a section on beginning spelling…