In this webinar, Janice A. Dole, Professor and Director of the Reading and Literacy Program in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Utah, discussed different strategies for delivering literacy instruction to meet a range of student needs, including the ways in which teachers can collaborate with reading specialists to…

As a result of the Reading First Program of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the view of reading has narrowed. Individual state's Reading First professional development programs, and hence reading teachers across the United States, have spent the six years since the funding of the program in 2002 focusing beginning and developmental reading on…

In this article, the author argues that there is minimal scientific support for the pedagogical approaches promoted for low-income students in the federal Reading First initiative. In combination with high-stakes testing, the interpretation of the construct "systematic phonics instruction" in Reading First has resulted in highly…

Phonics instruction alone cannot fully develop students' ability to comprehend a text or story. Reading instruction should emphasize students interaction with print, compensating for lower level skills with higher level skills, and gaining meaning and knowledge throughout the process. Too often, teachers give minimal attention to the development…

Reprints an exemplary article published in this journal in 1955, which points out that phonics is only one part of a total reading program. Emphasizes the fact that meaning for the reader must be the essential part of all reading instruction. (SR)

Uses reading-guide pyramid based on U.S. Department of Agriculture's food-guide pyramid to develop argument that new federal guidelines for scientific-based research will result in an unbalanced, phonics-rich approach to reading instruction. Argues for a balanced approach that includes comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, and phonics. (PKP)

The reading profession's current emphasis on whole language may have helped to raise the recurring debate between meaning-based (whole language) and phonics-based (code emphasis) approaches to teaching reading. As some researchers have linked whole language with whole word, phonics advocates have come forth with renewed vigor to offer a series of…

What do students need to achieve in reading? Students need to master phonics elements as needed. Ten cautions in teaching phonics are outlined, which also offer a framework for reading across the curriculum. Reflective thinking in reading is important, and students should be taught to ponder and probe ideas gleaned during and after reading…

States that beginning reading instruction must not be perceived as an either/or phenomenon, as either strong adherence to the code devoid of meaning, or the reverse. Teachers should teach the code and meaning at the same time. (MKM)

Presents the ideas of three people highly visible in the field of reading, each of whom holds different views about reading and reading instruction, in an effort to help teachers clarify their own thoughts. (FL)

Argues that, while children need to learn the syntactic, symantic, and graphonic cuing systems necessary to reading, the ultimate focus of elementary reading instruction should be reading for meaning. Describes an ideal classroom where students constantly interact with reading and writing and developing personal motivations for effective language…

Among the defining features of the whole language philosophy are: an emphasis on reading comprehension and extracting meaning from text; reading and writing across the curriculum; and the use of phonics instruction, subordinate to other methods (cues) of extracting meaning from text. Controversy between professional educators involved in…

A major problem in the teaching of reading is to determine the scope or breadth of the curriculum--how broad to develop the objectives of instruction becomes paramount in curriculum development. Breadth of the curriculum may then be represented by points on a continuum with a wider scope on one end and narrowing down toward the other end. This…

This paper argues that the ability to rapidly compare phonemes is a primary sensory-cognitive function underlying self-correction in word recognition and spelling and thus, indirectly, reading comprehension. Such phonological defects can be addressed both preventively and remedially using procedures that are fundamentally different from typical…

The author endorses the approach to teaching phonics set out in recent documents (e.g. Progression in Phonics) that extend and supersede the approach set out earlier in the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) Framework for Teaching. Proposed are minor, evidence-driven amendments to this approach. The assumption that failure to achieve continuing…