Beginning Reading: The Views of Parents and Teachers of Young Children.

The authors examined the views of parents and teachers regarding beginning reading instruction using the questionnaire Approaches to Beginning Reading and Reading Instruction (ABRRI). Parents also rated the importance of 9 developmental areas, including literacy, and the extent to which home and school were responsible for each. Two components emerged on the ABRRI reflecting decoding or graphophonemic aspects and broader knowledge or constructivist aspects. Parents more frequently endorsed a bottom-up description of reading than teachers and gave higher ratings to the graphophonemic component than the constructivist component, whereas the reverse was true for teachers. Parents rated literacy development second only to character-moral development but were divided as to the responsibility of the school versus the home in literacy development.