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…

Teaching students how to read is one of the most important tasks in elementary schools. The majority of schools use published basal programs to teach students to read. Several published reviews have indicated that past editions of basal readers did not align with appropriate instruction for beginning level readers. In this study I reviewed five of…

Criticizes Marie Carbo's article, "Debunking the Great Phonics Myth" (in Kappan's November 1988 issue), for waging a relentless debate against phonics and falsely attributing low U.S. reading achievement scores to a phonics emphasis. Clears up confusions and inaccuracies in Carbo's article concerning first and second editions of the…

Learning to read a relatively irregular orthography, such as English, is harder and takes longer than learning to read a relatively regular orthography, such as German. At the end of grade 1, the difference in reading performance on a simple set of words and nonwords is quite dramatic. Whereas children using regular orthographies are already close…

The major theory examined in this paper is that the increasing problem of illiteracy in the United States may be due to a faulty method of teaching reading. The causes of the illiteracy problem and possible solutions are explored using evidence from reading research and classroom results. The following topics concerning the teaching of reading are…

The Discrepancy Hypothesis posits that children early in the acquisition process read visually (holistically) and spell phonologically. This claim was examined and rejected. We investigated reading and spelling in Grade 1 and Grade 2 children using controlled non-word and word materials with a variety of orthographic patterns. While reading and…

Recent research on reading reveals many methods work for teaching reading. There are three individual reading styles: (1) those who need phonics, (2) those who can learn it but don't need it, and (3) those unable to learn phonics. The level of reading achievement depends on how well instructional program accommodates to an individual's reading…