Increasingly alarmed by instructional mandates more founded on journalistic rhetoric and popular opinion than on research findings or practitioner expertise, researchers gathered survey data from teachers to better understand the status of K-2 phonics instruction. Data demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of these K-2 teachers teach phonics,…

Community-based literacy learning spaces are crucial to the enduring African American pursuit of literacy. This article reports findings from a study exploring the impact of a community-based literacy tutoring program for African American readers in grades 3-5. Findings also report on ways the community literacy site was similar to historic…

Although the importance of literacy instruction has remained constant since the beginning of the new millennium, literacy trends have shifted, often alongside acts of legislation. Areas of literacy education that were once overlooked in the past like adolescent literacy and RTI are now receiving increased attention, whereas areas of literacy like…

The purpose of this article is to describe how teachers can foster strategic reading processes in their early literacy classrooms, and how to incorporate a Strategy Perception Interview to assist in documenting students' use and perceptions of these strategies. Descriptions of classroom instruction incorporating literacy strategies and…

In order to systemically improve student achievement in elementary literacy, a large urban school district partnered with a local university to develop a model for high-quality professional development that hopefully would result in long-term changes in teachers' literacy instructional/practices. Schools were selected based on their Adequate…

Concludes that intensive phonics teaching produces greater beginning reading achievement than do reading programs that deemphasize phonics teaching. (FL)

Briefly discusses research on consonant substitution and presents a five-step teaching strategy to help beginning readers use the words they know to figure out the words they don't know. (JM)

Questions the usefulness of lists of the most frequently used words in reading instruction, and recommends that teachers develop good phonics skills in young pupils and that teachers adopt the psycholinguistic approach to reading. (JM)

Reviews the history of phonics and whole word instruction, arguing that students' reading proficiency does benefit from learning fundamentals of phonics. (HTH)

Discusses several examples of extraneous loaded elements that are included in various published phonics and reading comprehension materials and in teacher-made tests. (TO)

Describes a study which found that the prospective special education teachers in the study population had severe deficits in their knowledge of basic phonics. (JM)

Supports the view that in testing phonics knowledge, it is important to use non-sense syllables. (RB)

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)

Explores the effectiveness of "word boxes" phonics instruction on beginning first-grade children's word identification and spelling performance. Finds that children in the word boxes condition significantly outperformed children in a more traditional phonics condition. Indicates that word boxes lessons can be a viable phonics approach to…

Updates T. Clymer's 1963 phonic generalization study by largely rewriting consonant generalizations. Consonants in 17,211 words from the Stanford Spelling Word List were analyzed and Clymer's 45 rules reduced to three, which predict consonant situations with 99 percent accuracy. (SRT).