LINGUISTIC AWARENESS AND READING PERFORMANCE AMONG BEGINNING READERS

Vygotsky (1934/1962) and Mattingly (1972] proposed that the contrast between the ease, universality, and naturalness of oral language learning and the apparent difficulty of learning to read can be explained by regarding reading as a deliberately learned language-based skill, depending upon the speaker's awareness of primary linguistic activity. The present study investigates the relationships between various aspects of linguistic awareness and early reading ability. Experiment I Subjects. Ten male and ten female children were drawn from the first and second grades of a Midwestern parochial school. The mean age of the ten first graders was 6.3 and the ten second graders was 7.6 years. Procedure. In one or more 45-minute individual sessions, the children were adminis-tered five tasks: Word Tapping Task (sentences to be repeated while tapping the table for each separate word); Word Discrimination Task (stimuli ranging from single phonemes to two-syllable words and two-word phrases to be classified as "word, " "not a word, " and "two words."); Sentence Comparison Task (the word(s) to be identified which dis