ABSTRACT
The aim of this longitudinal study was to test a model of the relationships among the major learning tasks, learning strategies, and cognitive prerequisites of beginning reading development. Path analyses were used to examine data collected toward the end of Year 1 (when the mean age of 141 target children was 5 years, 9 months), at the middle of Year 2 (when the mean age of the children was 6 years, 5 months), and at the end of Year 2 (when the mean age of the children was 6 years, 10 months). Results indicated that the ability to use letter-sound patterns and the ability to use sentence context made the strongest independent contributions to variance in early reading achievement; that each of these abilities appeared to influence the development of the other; that the use of letter-sound patterns exerted a stronger influence than the use of sentence context in relation to both early reading development and the reciprocal causation between these two factors; and that when extraneous variables and autoregressive effects were controlled, phonological sensitivity was the major factor influencing the ability to use letter-sound patterns, and grammatical sensitivity was the major factor influencing the ability to use sentence context. The findings suggested that, when beginning readers encounter unfamiliar words in text, they should be encouraged to use letter-sound patterns first and then to use sentence context, but only to confirm hypotheses about what unfamiliar words might be, based on information from decoding attempts.
