Evaluates five less-skilled readers in grades five and six. Uses a word-meaning acquisition task before and after instructional intervention to assess the effectiveness of students' process of deriving word meaning from context. Concludes that all five students improved on every component of the task. (SC)

Designed to improve reading comprehension and other complex verbal functions, fertile instruction in word skill focuses on improving accuracy of word knowledge, increasing fluency of access to meanings in memory, and enriching semantic network connections among related concepts. It is particularly appropriate for teaching the high frequency words…

Indicates that use of two microcomputer word recognition programs led to substantial increases in word recognition/decoding skills and to substantial improvements in comprehension at the word and proposition/sentence level, but to no improvement at the passage level. (NKA)