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culties, and more attention needs to be paid to research on the fourthgrade slump.

CONCLUSION

Table 2-2 shows a set of particular accomplishments that the successful learner is likely to exhibit during the early school years. This list is neither exhaustive nor incontestable, but it does capture many highlights of the course of reading acquisition that have been revealed through several decades of research. Needless to say, the timing of these accomplishments will to some extent depend on the particular curriculum provided by a school. For example, in many areas of the country, the kindergarten year is not mandatory and little formal reading instruction is provided until the start of first grade. The summary sketch provided by the table of the typical accomplishments related to reading over the first years of a child's schooling presupposes, of course, appropriate familial support and access to effective educational resources. At the same time, there are enormous individual differences in children's progression from playing with refrigerator letters to reading independently, and many pathways that can be followed successfully.

Ideally, the child comes to reading instruction with well-developed language abilities, a foundation for reading acquisition, and varied experiences with emergent literacy. The achievement of real reading requires knowledge of the phonological structures of language and how the written units connect with the spoken units. Phonological sensitivity at the subword level is important in this achievement. Very early, children who turn out to be successful in learning to read use phonological connection to letters, including letter names, to establish context-dependent phonological connections, which allow productive reading. An important mechanism for this is phonological recoding, which helps the child acquire high-quality word representations. Gains in fluency (automaticity) come with increased experience, as does increased lexical knowledge that supports word identification.

Briefly put, we can say that children need simultaneous access to some knowledge of letter-sound relationships, some sight vocabu-