The eight popular commercial reading programs examined in this study were selected on the basis of their use with compensatory education students and the fact that they represent different instructional approaches. The study examined how readers are taught to break the letter/sound code, what correspondences are taught, and how correspondences are…

This paper proposes that phonics and meaning instruction in beginning reading programs can be designed to be mutually supportive. The first section outlines attempts to modify a commercially available reading program in order to provide useful phonics instruction strategies. Students showed strong gains on achievement tests after implementation of…

The staff of the Reading Project of the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, having previously experimented with beginning reading programs, adapted commercially available materials for use in an individualized elementary school environment. Their activities culminated in The New Primary Grades Reading System…

Approaches that appear most effective for teaching beginning reading to children who are having difficulty learning to read are discussed in this paper. Research indicates that a code-emphasis method produces the best results. To determine which type of code instruction is most appropriate, reading programs were analyzed in terms of content,…

The instruction provided by two beginning reading programs (the Ginn 720 and the Palo Alto 1973 reading programs) are analyzed and compared in this paper on the basis of such factors as phoneme-grapheme correspondence and phonics instruction, sight word learning, and the development of reading comprehension. The comparison focuses primarily on the…