Discusses five ways to determine the amount and quality of prior knowledge children bring to a topic: (1) free recall tasks, (2) word association tasks, (3) structured questions, (4) recognition tasks, and (5) unstructured discussion. (FL)

Discusses what children know--and don't know they know--about the linguistic concept of the word, with implications for teaching. (DD)

Presents a seven-step technique for teaching primary school students to recognize function words. Describes a method for eliciting parent help in the task and offers suggestions for review and follow-up activities. (FL)

Points out that children must master a great deal of information about form classes, written conventions, and word referent relationships in order to understand what teachers mean when they use the term "word." (FL)

Criticizes the usefulness of teaching consonant substitution as a word attack skill and suggests that its main function is improving letter-sound associations. Bibliography. (RW)

Suggests a variety of class activities using word banks. (MKM)

Reports a study of fourteen word lists and proposes a basic list of 240 starter words. (TO)

Reviews the literature in the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) on teaching spelling and word attack skills at the elementary level. (RB)

Surveys how children develop their powers of word identification, and questions common assumptions about the utility of sight words. (TO)

A deep, developmental construct and definition of fluency, in which fluency and reading comprehension have a reciprocal relationship, is explicated and contrasted with superficial approaches to that construct. The historical development of fluency is outlined, along with conclusions of the U.S. National Reading Panel, to explore why fluency has…

Suggests teaching a compare/contrast method of word identification rather than teaching syllabication rules to decode words and describes research investigating this technique. (MKM)

This study, which extends Jeffrey and Samuels' study, indicates that children taught "sounds" learned more grapheme-phoneme correspondences and read more transfer words than did those taught "words." (HOD)

Examines some problems and techniques for teaching prefixes and suffixes at the middle elementary level. States that fewer affixes should be taught, while emphasizing the application of affix knowledge to unfamiliar words. Lists the most common prefixes and suffixes in printed school English for grades three to nine. (MM)