ABSTRACT
Children are taught to read the alphabet and they have to be shown how to use it because the whole system of linking words and sounds to written symbols is an arbitrary one. Teachers have for centuries been showing children how letters signify sounds and how collections of letters represent collections of sounds which add up to meaningful words. " Phonic" methods involve teaching children about sounds and about their relation to alphabetic letters and written words. Training studies that test the phonological connection, by much the same token, are usually quite inadequate evidence as far as teaching methods are concerned. The training given to the children in the two experimental groups involved concentrated experience of segmentation and of blending the sounds in real and nonsense words. The result tells us of a powerful teaching method but does not on its own establish a connection between children's awareness of sounds and their reading.
