Each clearly differentiated program of reading instruction is based on a selected psychological school of thought. Rather than emphasizing one traditional plan of teaching, the teacher needs to study and analyze the student's curricular achievement to see what fits into the learner's repertoire of skills and knowledge. The materials and methods of instruction should harmonize with what would assist students to achieve optimally in reading. This paper discusses basal reading instruction, individualized reading, sustained silent reading, the big book approach, and controlled vocabulary readers. The paper also discusses using linguistic programs of reading instruction, focusing on the approaches of Leonard Bloomfield and Charles Fries and describing their philosophy and psychology of linguistic reading instruction. According to the paper, both educators emphasized a patterns approach in the teaching of reading. The paper states that there are selected word patterns which may be used to illustrate their thinking--students initially might experiment with the following patterns in reading: an, ban, can, fan, man, ran, tan, van. It notes that several basic spelling textbooks use linguistic procedures in having students learn to spell words, and that linguists have also made a plethora of contributions when writing sentence patterns. (Contains 11 references.) (NKA)