Three recent studies have focused upon prereading children's concepts of written language, what they think words are, and how they understand the concept of a word. These explorations of young children's early attempts to understand and produce writing have important implications for the preschool and primary classroom. R. D. Morris found that first graders' concepts of a word in print as a bound configuration was related to their phoneme segmentation ability and to success in beginning to read. Based on these findings, a teacher could recite the lines of simple rhymes while pointing to the words and then ask children individually to point to the words as the rhyme is recited. It can be assumed that the child who cannot make the speech-to-print match after memorizing the rhyme does not yet possess the conceptual frame for reading. M. J. Kita explored prereaders' concepts of the purposes for reading and writing. She found that children have a better grasp of the purposes for writing than of the purposes for reading, indicating that early writing experience eases children into beginning reading. C. A. Temple related the strategies of young English speaking spellers to those of children speaking Spanish and found the same types of systematic misspellings, in spite of the regularity of Spanish phonology. This finding suggests that teachers should view children's invented spellings as positive attempts to represent speech rather than as errors. (MKM)