High frequency words, commonly referred to as sight words, are often a focus of emergent reading instruction. Instructional practices abound that require emergent readers to memorize the spelling and pronunciation of the words without drawing attention to grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) in the words. These approaches ignore a critical…

In elementary school, an important goal of reading instruction is to enable children to read most words automatically by sight so that they can focus on learning from and enjoying what they are reading. But becoming a strong reader takes several years. Parents and caregivers need to know if a child is making good progress in learning to read.…

Little is known about the content and quality of reading instruction provided to students with intellectual disability. This study aimed to describe the reading instruction provided to students with intellectual disability who were not yet readers in self-contained elementary classrooms. The teachers of 24 classrooms participated in the study.…