A hallmark of skilled reading is recognizing written words automatically from memory by sight. How beginning readers attain this skill is explained. They must acquire foundational knowledge, including phonemic segmentation, grapheme-phoneme knowledge, decoding, and spelling skills. When these skills are applied, spellings of words become bonded to…

Two struggling fourth-grade readers with learning disabilities who have severe deficits in word recognition, comprehension, and reading fluency improve their reading skills using a method that combines intensive word study with the timed repeated reading of poetry. The direct instruction included semantics, morphology, orthography, and…

Suggests that children's writing is an excellent source of pertinent information about spelling and word recognition skills and analyzes one child's writing to demonstrate how an analysis of misspellings might proceed and how information obtained might be used to direct future instruction. (Author/RB)

Discusses what children know--and don't know they know--about the linguistic concept of the word, with implications for teaching. (DD)

Misspellings by first through fifth grade students were classified as to probable underlying spelling strategies. An overall shift strategy from sound to print was reflected in fifth grade errors independent of word difficulty. (FL)

Presents three principles for working with poor readers in the upper elementary grades: (1) bring the class together as a literate community; (2) integrate reading and writing instruction; and (3) provide instruction on specific skills. Describes how one teacher, through application of these principles, helped a student overcome his reading…