Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers . (2000). By Louisa Cook Moats. Brookes Publishing, P.O. Box 10624, Baltimore, MD 21285-0624. 304 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by John Dellegrotto, Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network, Harrisburg, PA.

The author has provided all persons who teach children with a "landmark" contribution to enable us to identify, understand, and solve the problems students encounter when learning to read and write. She provides the fundamental language base as the foundation for teaching children to read explicitly and systematically. Readers will understand the organization of written and spoken English, discover the connection between language structure and how individuals learn to read, and apply the concepts of phoneme awareness, spelling, vocabulary, and comprehension in sample lessons plans.

Specific chapters on Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, the Structure of English Orthography, Semantics, Syntax, and Language Instruction provide the reader with a comprehensive understanding to demonstrate the relationship between language development and academic success in reading. Sample lesson plans provide specific content application to the classroom setting. The author has done an excellent job of explaining the language connection to academic success relationship by using straightforward language that persons from many different backgrounds can understand.

In Speech to Print , Moats provides significant evidence indicating that certain approaches to having students make the transition from speech to print are more effective than others, and proceeds to delineate the developmental, cognitive, and linguistic characteristics of these approaches. This book is a "must" for speech-language pathologists who want to understand, demonstrate, and teach the process of how we all make the transition from spoken language to obtaining meaning from the printed word in a literate society.