Language Awareness and Learning to Read

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

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2. Introduction

   • John Downing, Renate Valtin

   Pages 1-7

3. Reading, Linguistic Awareness, and Language Acquisition

   • Ignatius G. Mattingly

   Pages 9-25

4. Task Awareness in the Development of Reading Skill

   • John Downing

   Pages 27-55

5. Students’ Perceptions of Reading: Insights From Research and Pedagogical Implications

   • Jerry L. Johns

   Pages 57-77

6. Children’s Thinking about Language and Their Acquisition of Literacy

   • Anne Sinclair, Ioanna Berthoud-Papandropoulou

   Pages 79-91

7. Cognitive Development and Units of Print in Early Reading

   • Alan J. Watson

   Pages 93-118

8. How Orthography Alters Spoken Language Competencies in Children Learning to Read and Spell

   • Linnea C. Ehri

   Pages 119-147

9. Learning to Attend to Sentence Structure: Links Between Metalinguistic Development and Reading

   • Ellen Bouchard Ryan, George W. Ledger

   Pages 149-171

10. Theory and Practice in Learning to Read

    • Douglas Pidgeon

    Pages 173-191

11. Learning to Read and Skilled Reading: Multiple Systems Interacting Within and Between the Reader and the Text

    • Harry Singer

    Pages 193-206

12. The Development of Metalinguistic Abilities in Children Learning to Read and Write

    • Renate Valtin

    Pages 207-226

13. Awareness of Features and Functions of Language

    • Renate Valtin

    Pages 227-260

14. Back Matter

    Pages 261-305

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During the 1970s there was a rapid increase in interest in metacognition and metalinguistics. The impetus came from linguistics, psychology, and psycho­ linguistics. But with rather unusual rapidity the work from these scientific dis­ ciplines was taken over in education. This new direction in these various areas of academic study was taken simultaneously by several different investigators. Although they had varying emphases, their work sometimes appears to be over­ lapping; despite this, it has been rather difficult to find a consensus. This is reflected in the varying terminology used by these independent investigators­ "linguistic awareness," "metacognition," "metalinguistic ability," "task aware­ ness," "lexical awareness," and so on. For educators these developments presented a glittering array of new ideas that promised to throw light on children's thinking processes in learning how to read. Many reading researchers and graduate students have perceived this as a new frontier for the development of theory and research. However, the variety of independent theoretical approaches and their accompanying terminologies has been somewhat confusing.

• Language
• Phase
• Terminologie
• awareness
• cognition
• education
• learning
• literacy
• perception
• psychology

• Department of Psychological Foundations in Education, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada

  John Downing

• Central Institute for Education Science and Curriculum Development, Freie Universität, Berlin 33, Federal Republic of Germany

  Renate Valtin

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