Pictographs and prereading skills

This paper draws upon data collected in conjunction with the Schools Council (Great Britain) Research and Development Project in Compensatory Education to demonstrate that a picture reading task can provide a fairly good prediction of the later reading performance of 100 5-year-olds and that it is a sufficiently interesting clinical tool to merit further consideration from nursery and infant school teachers. The test's success seems to relate to its ability to measure differences in children's understanding of the nature and purpose of reading.