An important instructional goal in the early grades is to teach children to read. One reason for the lack of complete success in today's schools is that the normal reading acquisition process is not well understood. The proposed research is intended to study how prereaders move into reading and begin acquiring decoding skill, how beginning readers become more skilled at processing words, and whether and how learning to spell contributes in learning to read. Eight experiments will be conducted. Five will be training studies to assess whether the following acquisitions enhance children's ability to learn to read: awareness of articulatory movements; short-vowel letter-sound relations learned with picture mnemonics; various kinds of spelling instruction and practice including how to spell phonetically. One experiment will be a classroom longitudinal study to explore the course of spelling development in first and second grades. One experiment will examine whether allowing children to misspell words interferes with learning correct spelling. One experiment will examine how spellings of words are stored inmemory by beginning and poor readers. The methodology will be to pretest our subjects' reading and spelling knowledge, to assign them randomly to experimental and control groups, to train them and then test for learning and transfer. Findings should contribute to basic knowledge of reading and spelling acquisition processes and should carry implications for how to improve instruction: how to make it easier for children to move into independent word reading; whether and how spelling instruction/practice contributes; whether teachers should encourage beginners to invent spellings or to practice only correct spellings; how to teach vowel decoding more effectively. In present-day society, acquisition of literacy skills is essential for healthy physical and mental development. It is a basic requirement for success in school. School failure can exacerbate illness arising from other sources and possibly cause illness indirectly itself. School failure is a leading cause of poor self esteem. Its victims often become costly burdens to society. Research on reading acquisition which is theory-based, which utilizes tools of experimental psychology and concepts from psychology and linguistics, and which addresses instructional questions, holds promise of improving the record of success in schools.
