Evaluating Letter Discrimination Problems in the Primary Grades

Abstract

Despite the attention given to reading instruction by teachers and researchers, the nature of some basic skills involved in the reading process has not been sufficiently examined. Letter discrimination is one of these. Reading specialists feel that children must be able to distinguish one letter from another before they can learn more complex tasks such as decoding and word analysis. Yet the data presented in this paper suggest that a substantial proportion or children do not adequately distinguish between letters until they reach the third grade. Most of the problems encountered in teaching letter discrimination appear to result from the lack of a completely satisfactory description of what is meant by knowing the letters of the alphabet and a lack of techniques for measuring such knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to develop a behavioral definition of letter recognition, to present a test for measuring the extent to which children can recognize letters, and to report data for kindergarten through grade three using that test. Several researchers have examined problems related to letter discrimination tasks. Gibson (1965) reported that children could learn to read sight-words without being able to distinguish letters