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promoting subsequent development of reading. Whether

these effects are great enough to inspire enthusiasm, how-

ever, depends on the eye of the observing scientist; some sci-

entists see large and important effects (Bus, van IJzendoorn,

& Pelligrini, 1995; Dunning, Mason, & Stewart, 1994;

Lonigan, 1994), whereas others who examine the same out-

comes see small effects that might be explained away as due

to factors other than verbal stimulation (Scarborough &

Dobrich, 1994). I tend to favor the former rather than the lat-

ter conclusion; the experimental work of Whitehurst and his

colleagues especially affects my thinking on this matter. In

general, my optimism is consistent with the general optimism

of the field that rich early language experiences affect lan-

guage development in ways that should affect later reading

development (Sulzby & Teale, 1991; Yaden et al., 2000).

Phonemic Awareness

In recent years, no prereading competency has received as

much attention from researchers and practitioners as phone-

mic awareness has. Understanding that words are composed

of blended sounds seems essential for rapid progress in

learning letter-sound associations and learning to use those

associations to sound out words (Adams, 1990; Pennington,

Groisser, & Welsh, 1993; Stanovich, 1986, 1988). This is not

an all-or-none acquisition, however; Adams (1990) provides a

conceptualization of phonemic awareness subcompetencies,

listed as follows from most rudimentary to most advanced:

(a) sensitivity to rhymes in words, (b) being able to spot words

that do not rhyme (e.g., picking the odd word out if given can,

dan, sod), (c) being able to blend sounds to form words (e.g.,

blending the sounds for M, short A, and T to produce mat),

(d) being able to break words down into sound components

(e.g., sounding out mat to indicate awareness of M, short A,

and T sounds), and (e) being able to split off sounds from

words (e.g., dropping the M sound from mat to say at; drop-

ping the T sound from mat, producing ma).

Why is there such great interest in phonemic awareness?

When phonemic awareness is low at ages 4–5, there is in-

creased risk of difficulties in learning to read and spell (Bowey,

1995; Griffith, 1991; Näsland & Schneider, 1996; Pratt &

Brady, 1988; Shaywitz, 1996; Stuart & Masterson, 1992).

Perhaps the best-known study establishing linkage between

phonemic awareness at the end of the preschool years and later

reading achievement was Juel (1988). She studied a sample of

children as they progressed from first through fourth grade.

Problems in reading during Grade 1 predicted problems in

reading at Grade 4—that is, problem readers in first grade do

not just learn to read when they are ready! Rather, they never

seem to learn to read as well as do children who were strong

readers in Grade 1. More important to this discussion is that

low phonemic awareness in Grade 1 predicted poor reading

performance in Grade 4, a result generally consistent with

other demonstrations that low phonemic awareness between

4 and 6 years of age predict later reading problems (Bowey,

1995; Griffith, 1991; Näsland & Schneider, 1996; Pratt &

Brady, 1988; Shaywitz, 1966; Stuart & Masterson, 1992).

Given that phonological awareness is so critical in learning

to read, it is fortunate that phonological awareness has proven

teachable; when taught, it influences reading performance

positively. Perhaps the best known demonstration of the po-

tency of phonemic awareness instruction is that provided by

Bradley and Bryant (1983). They provided 5- and 6-year-olds

with 2 years of experience categorizing words on the basis of

their sounds, including practice doing so with beginning, mid-

dle, and ending sounds. Thus, given the words hen, men, and

hat with the request to categorize on the basis of initial sound,

hen and hat went together; in contrast, hen and men was the

correct answer when the children were asked to categorize on

the basis of middle or ending sound. The students in the study

first read pictures and made their choices on the basis of

sounds alone; then they were transferred to words and could

make their choices on the basis of letter and orthographic

features as well as sounds.

The training made a substantial impact on reading mea-

sured immediately after training, relative to a control condi-

tion in which students made judgments about the conceptual

category membership of words (e.g., identifying that cat, rat,

and bat go together as animals). Even more impressive was

that the trained participants outperformed control participants

in reading 5 years after the training study took place (Bradley,

1989; Bradley & Bryant, 1991).

Bradley and Bryant’s work was the first of a number of

studies establishing that phonemic awareness could be de-

veloped through instruction and influence reading perfor-

mance (Ball & Blachman, 1988, 1991; Barker & Torgesen,

1995; Blachman, 1991; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991,

1993, 1995; Cunningham, 1990; Foster, Erickson, Foster,

Brinkman, & Torgesen, 1994; Lie, 1991; Lundberg, Frost, &

Peterson, 1988; O’Connor, Jenkins, & Slocum, 1995; Tangel

& Blachman, 1992, 1995; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987;

Williams, 1980; Wise & Olson, 1995). Although the instruc-

tional procedures varied somewhat from study to study, in

general, phonemic awareness training has included at least

several months of exercises requiring young children to attend

to the component sounds of words, categorizing and dis-

criminating words on the basis of sound features. Thus, some-

times children were asked to tap out the syllables of words,

First Grade and the Primary Years

337

sometimes asked to say the word with the last sound deleted,

and sometimes requested to identify the odd word out when

one does not share some sound with other words in a group.

Bus and van IJzendoorn (1999) provided especially com-

plete and analytical review of the phonemic awareness in-

structional data. Collapsing data over 32 research reports, all

of which were generated by U.S. investigators, Bus and van

IJzendoorn (1999) concluded that there was a moderate rela-

tionship between phonemic awareness instruction and later

reading. When long-term effects (i.e., 6 months or more fol-

lowing training) were considered, however, the phonemic

awareness instruction had less of an impact on reading—a

small impact at best. Thus, although delayed effects of phone-

mic awareness training can be detected, they are not huge.

All scientifically oriented reviewers of the early reading

literature have concluded that phonemic awareness is impor-

tant as part of learning to read (e.g., Adams, 1990; Adams,

Treiman, & Pressley, 1998; Goswami, 2000; National Read-

ing Panel, 2000; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). The available

correlational and experimental data converge on the conclu-

sion that phonemic awareness is probably an important pre-

requisite for learning to read words. After all, if a child does

not understand that words are composed of sounds blended

together, why would reading instruction emphasizing the

component sounds of words make any sense to the child? Of

course, the answer is that it would not, which explains why

phonemic awareness is so critical for a child to learn to read

(e.g., Fox & Routh, 1975). Acquiring phonemic awareness is

just a start on word recognition competence, which is a criti-

cal task during the primary grades.

In summary, much progress in literacy development can

and does occur before Grade 1, which has traditionally been

viewed as the point of schooling for beginning reading in-

struction. Much of it is informal—the learning of language in

a language-rich environment that can include activities such

as storybook reading with adults. Increasingly, high-quality

kindergarten programs include activities explicitly intended

to develop phonemic awareness.

FIRST GRADE AND THE PRIMARY YEARS

There has been tremendous debate in the past quarter century

about the best approach to primary-grades reading educa-

tion. This debate somewhat reflects a much longer debate (i.e.,

one occurring over centuries to millennia) about the nature

of beginning reading instruction (see Pressley, Allington,

Wharton-McDonald, Block, & Morrow, 2001). In recent

years, at one extreme have been those who have advocated an

approach known as whole language, which posits that chil-

dren should be immersed in holistic reading and writing tasks

from the very start of schooling—that is, reading trade books

and composing their own stories. At the other extreme are

those who argue that skills should be developed first. The

skills-first advocates particularly favor phonics as an ap-

proach to developing word-recognition abilities; they argue

that if students learn letter-sound associations and how to

blend the component sounds in words to recognize words,

their word recognition will be more accurate and more certain.

Word Recognition

Even preschoolers can read some words, such as McDonald’s

when in the context of the company’s logo, Coca-Cola when

encountered on a bottle or aluminum can, and Yankees when

scripted across a ballplayer’s chest. Young children learn to

recognize such logographs from their day-to-day experiences.

When presented the words McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and

Yankees out of their familiar contexts, preliterate children

cannot read them. Even so, encountering words as logographs

somehow seems to make it easier for preschoolers to learn

words out of context. When Cronin, Farrell, and Delaney

(1995) taught preschoolers words as sight words, previously

encountered logographs were learned more easily than were

control words never encountered as logographs. At best, how-

ever, logographic reading is just a start on word-recognition

skills and is very different from most of word recognition.

Well before children can sound out words using all the let-

ters of a word, they sometimes can read words based on a few

letters, a process Ehri (1991) referred to as phonetic cue read-

ing. Thus, as a little boy, I learned the very long word ele-

mentary because I encountered it often during first grade. As

a consequence, I could read elementary wherever I encoun-

tered the word. The problem was that I was reading the word

based on a couple of cues (probably the beginning e and the

fact that it was a long word) shared by other words. Thus, for

quite a while, I thought that label on the escape hatch in the

school bus was labeled elementary door, when in fact it was

an emergency door! Such mistakes are common in children

who are 5–6 years old (Ehri & Wilce, 1987a, 1987b; Gilbert,

Spring, & Sassenrath, 1977; Seymour & Elder, 1986).

Many children do reach the kindergarten doors knowing

the alphabet. One reason is that as a society, we decided to

teach the alphabet to preschoolers—for example, through ef-

forts such as those in Sesame Street; it is clear from the earliest

evaluations that such environmental enrichment did affect ac-

quisition of alphabetic knowledge (e.g., Anderson & Collins,

1988; Ball & Bogatz, 1970; Bogatz & Ball, 1971). It is now

338

Psychology of Literacy and Literacy Instruction

known that Sesame Street contributes to alphabetic learning

over and above the contributions made by family and others

(Rice, Huston, Truglio, & Wright, 1990).

Knowing letter names and letter-sound associations alone

does not result in word recognition competence, however.

Children must also learn the common blends (e.g., dr, bl) and

digraphs (e.g., sh, ch). In general, primary education includes

lots of repetition of the common letter-sound associations,

blends, and digraphs—for example, through repeated reading

of stories filled with high-frequency words. Walk into any

Grade 1 classroom: It will be filled with many single-syllable

words, including lists of words featuring the common di-

graphs and blends. Word families also will be prominent (e.g.,

beak, peak, leak). Grade 1 teachers spend a lot of time model-

ing for their students how to sound out words by blending the

component sounds in words and using common chunks; they

also spend a lot of time encouraging students to sound out

words on their own, including doing so to write words in their

compositions (Wharton-McDonald, Pressley, & Hampston,

1998).

The students most likely to make rapid progress in learn-

ing to sound out words are those who already have phonemic

awareness and know their letter-sound associations (Tunmer,

Herriman, & Nesdale, 1988). Even so, a large body of evi-

dence indicates that teaching students to sound out words by

blending components’ sounds is better than alternative ap-

proaches with respect to development of word-recognition

skills.

Teaching Primary-Level Students to Sound Out Words

One of the most important twentieth-century contributions to

reading research was Jeanne Chall’s (1967) Learning to

Read: The Great Debate. After reviewing all of the evidence

then available, Chall concluded that the best way to teach be-

ginning reading was to teach students explicitly to sound out

words—that is, she felt that early reading instruction should

focus on teaching letter-sound associations and the blending

of letter sounds to recognize words, an approach she referred

to as synthetic phonics. Based on the available research,

Chall concluded that synthetic phonics was superior to other

approaches regardless of the ability level of the child, al-

though synthetic phonics seemed to be especially beneficial

to lower-ability children. After the publication of the first

edition of the Chall book, there was a flurry of laboratory

studies of phonics instruction, and most researchers found

synthetic phonics to be better than alternatives (Chall, 1983,

Table I-2, pp. 18–20).

The next book-length treatment of the scientific founda-

tions of beginning reading instruction was Marilyn Adams’

(1990) Beginning to Read. By the time of that publication, a

great deal of conceptualization and analysis of beginning

reading had occurred. Adams reviewed for her readers the ev-

idence permitting the conclusion that phonemic awareness is

a critical prerequisite to word recognition. So was acquisition

of the alphabetic principle, which is the understanding that

the sounds in words are represented by letters. Researchers

interested in visual perceptual development had made the

case that children gradually acquire understanding of the

distinctive visual features of words, gradually learning to

discriminate Rs from Bs and Vs from Ws (Gibson, Gibson,

Pick, & Osser, 1962; Gibson & Levin, 1975). Consistent with

Chall (1967, 1983), Adams also concluded that instruction

in synthetic phonics promoted beginning word-recognition

skills.

Since Adams’ (1990) book, a number of demonstrations

have shown that intensive instruction in synthetic phonics

helps beginning struggling readers. For example, Foorman,

Francis, Novy, and Liberman (1991) studied urban first-grade

students who were enrolled either in a program emphasizing

synthetic phonics or in a program downplaying phonics in

word recognition in favor of whole language. By the end of

the year, the students in the synthetic phonics program were

reading and spelling words better than were students in the

other program. Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, Schatschneider,

and Mehta (1998) reported a similar outcome; a program em-

phasizing synthetic phonics produced better reading after a

year of instruction than did three alternatives that did not

provide systematic phonics instruction. Maureen Lovett

treats 9- to 13-year-olds who are experiencing severe reading

problems; she and her colleagues have presented consider-

able evidence that systematic teaching of synthetic pho-

nics improves the reading of such children (Lovett, Ransby,

Hardwick, Johns, & Donaldson, 1989; Lovett et al., 1994).

Similar results have been produced in a number of well-

controlled studies (Alexander, Anderson, Heilman, Voeller, &

Torgesen, 1991; Manis, Custodio, & Szeszulski, 1993; Olson,

Wise, Johnson, & Ring, 1997; Torgesen et al., 1996; Vellutino

et al., 1996), permitting the clear conclusion that intensive

(i.e., one-on-one or one teacher to a few students) synthetic

phonics instruction can help struggling beginning readers.

In recent years, a popular alternative to synthetic phonics

has been teaching students to decode words by recognizing

common chunks (or rimes) in them (e.g., tight, light, and

sight include the -ight chunk). Use of such chunks to decode,

however, requires that students know something about letters

and sounds and about blending (Ehri & Robbins, 1992;

Peterson & Haines, 1992) because word recognition requires

blending the sounds produced by individual letters with the

sounds produced by a chunk (e.g., tight involves blending the

First Grade and the Primary Years

339

t and ight sounds; Bruck & Treiman, 1992). In evaluations to

date, when struggling readers have been taught to use com-

mon word chunks to decode words they have not seen before,

this approach has been successful relative to controls who re-

ceive conventional instruction not emphasizing word recog-

nition (e.g., Lovett et al., 2000). Students taught to use word

chunks have fared as well after several months of such in-

struction as students taught to use synthetic phonics (Walton,

Walton, & Felton, 2001). Thus, available data indicate that

young children can learn to use both chunks and the sounding

out of individual sounds as they learn to recognize words

(Goswami, 2000). Perhaps most striking in the Walton et al.

(2001) report was that weak first-grade readers tutored either

to use chunks to decode or to sound out words using phonics

caught up with good first-grade readers who continued to

receive conventional reading instruction that emphasized

neither use of chunks during reading nor synthetic phonics.

These are powerful procedures for remediating the most

salient problem in beginning reading, which is difficulty in

recognizing words. Even so, they have not been the most

popular procedures in recent years for remediating troubled

beginning readers.

Reading Recovery

Reading Recovery™ is a widely disseminated approach to

beginning reading remediation (Lyons, Pinnell, & DeFord,

1993). Typically, students in Reading Recovery are in Grade 1

and making slow progress in learning to read in the regular

classroom. The intervention supplements classroom instruc-

tion and involves daily one-teacher-to-one-child lessons;

each lesson lasts about a half hour, and lessons continue for

as long as a semester.

A typical Reading Recovery lesson involves a series of

literacy tasks (Clay, 1993; Lyons et al., 1993). First, the child

reads a familiar book aloud to the teacher. Often, this task

is followed by reading of another book that is not quite as

familiar—one introduced to the child the day before. During

this reading of yesterday’s new book, the teacher makes a

running record, noting what the child does well during read-

ing and recording errors. Information gleaned by the teacher

as the child reads is used to make instructional decisions, and

the teacher attempts to determine the processes being used by

the child during reading.

For example, when the child makes an error during reading,

the teacher notes whether the child relied on meaning clues to

guess the word, syntactic cues, or visual cues; this analysis of

processing informs instructional decision making. Thus, if the

child misreads bit as sit, the teacher might focus the child’s

attention on the it chunk in the word and prompt the child

to blend the s sound and the sound made by it. After the read-

ing, the teacher continues the lesson by asking the student to

identify plastic letters or by having the child make and break

words with plastic letters. For example, the teacher might

focus on words with the it chunk, prompting the child to form

new words with the it chunk, using magnetic letters to con-

struct the words (e.g., bit, fit, mit, pit, etc.). Then the child

might break these words to see that bit is b plus it, fit is f plus

it, and so on. Then the child might do some writing in response

to the story, with the teacher providing assistance as the child

works on writing (e.g., writing a sentence about the story, such

as The dog sits down). During writing, the teacher encourages

the child to listen for the sounds in words in order to spell

out the word in writing. Then, the teacher writes the sentence

constructed by the student on a paper strip, using conven-

tional spelling to do so, then cutting up the strip into individ-

ual words. The child reassembles the sentence and reads it

for the teacher. The Reading Recovery lesson concludes with

the teacher’s introducing a new book to the student, who

attempts to read the book for the teacher. Homework involves

taking home the books read during the lesson and reading

them to a parent.

Reading Recovery is all about children’s reading strategies

and the teaching of strategies to struggling readers (Clay,

1993; Lyons et al., 1993). Throughout a Reading Recovery

lesson, the teacher attempts to determine how the child is pro-

cessing during reading and writing and the what reading and

writing strategies are used by the child. Specifically, the

teacher attempts to determine the reader’s directions of pro-

cessing (i.e., whether reading is left to right, from the top

of the page down; whether writing is left to right, from the

top to bottom of the page). The teacher also attempts to dis-

cern whether the child is processing individual words in a

sequence—for example, whether the child is noticing the

spaces between words read and putting spaces between words

written. The teacher notes whether the child is monitoring

reading and writing—for example, going back and attempting

to reread a misread word or asking for help during writing re-

garding spelling an unknown word. The Reading Recovery

teacher focuses on the nature of reading errors—whether they

reflect attempts to sound out a word, a reliance on meaning or

syntactic cues, or dependence on visual similarity of the at-

tempted word with a word known by the child. In short, the

assumption in Reading Recovery is that the struggling reader

is attempting to problem-solve when reading and writing,

and that the child’s errors are particularly revealing about her

or his reading and writing strategies.

The teacher’s knowledge of the child’s strategies is used to

guide teaching, and the teacher’s role is to stimulate use of

strategies during reading and writing that are more effective