Despite strong theoretical and empirical evidence suggesting that word meaning knowledge plays a critical role in word reading, interventions for students with word reading difficulties and disabilities frequently target word reading instruction in isolation. This article connects reading theory to practice by describing one approach to integrate…

This longitudinal study documents a trilingual child's struggle with decoding and word recognition, the remedies sought to help him start reading in his second language (English) while he was in French immersion, and his performance after the intervention on tests of phonological awareness in L1 Romanian, L2 English, and L3 French. The study…

"Reading Mastery," one of several curriculum components that constitute the "Direct Instruction" curriculum from SRA/McGraw-Hill, is designed to provide systematic instruction in reading to students in grades K-6. "Reading Mastery," which can be used as an intervention program for struggling readers, as a supplement…

Investigates whether readers of Turkish (which has a simple relation between spelling and sound) depend more on decoding for word recognition than readers of English (which has an "opaque" orthography). Suggests that readers become less dependent on phonological mediation with experience and that this reduction is more rapid for readers of opaque…

Explores early stages of reading acquisition, specifically the relation of phoneme blending and letter recoding to individual differences in word decoding. Examines the ability to recode letters, blend phonemes and decode words in Dutch children. Indicates that results are consistent with the self teaching hypothesis and other theories that imply…

Suggests measures of the reading-related variables are so closely connected that highly reliable measures of spelling level and word attack level for a student could be used to estimate or predict the student's levels of reading, listening, and word identification, and highly reliable measures of reading level and word identification level for a…

Uses picture-word interference tasks to examine the relationship between reading achievement and the automatic recognition of familiar and less familiar words and pseudowords. Finds that achieving and nonachieving fourth-grade readers show similar automatic recognition of both familiar and less familiar words. (MM)

Students in grades 1-6 who were part of the norming sample for the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement took both a word identification task, Reading and Decoding, and a spelling test. Each word in both tests was coded for linguistic components: number of phonemes, consonant blends, vowel digraphs, consonant digraphs, r-controlled vowels,…

Contends that the differences between spoken and written syllables make the teaching of syllabication as an aid to increased decoding skills questionable. (TO)

Two roles for phonological recoding, as a back-up mechanism used when visual word identification fails and as a self-teaching mechanism for visual word identification, are examined in view of research findings on development of reading comprehension and on the relationship of reading disabilities and phonological processing deficits. Teaching…

The relationship between word synthesis and beginning reading achievement is tested. A stable direct relationship is evidenced between the two, regardless of the child's reading strategy. (JMF)

Debates the question of how automaticity in reading develops. Suggests that the traditional view of automaticity development (a result of limited attentional capacity) does not adequately describe the process. Discusses comparisons of alternative views of automaticity and the traditional view. (RS)

Investigates context effects for words with more than one meaning. Finds that younger children (third graders) were more sensitive to the sentence context in which an ambiguous word appears, whereas the processing of older children (sixth graders) was determined more by the relative frequencies of the word meanings. (RS)

Finds high correlations between word reading and nonword reading; and skill in word identification was almost inseparable from the phonologically analytic decoding process that is tapped by nonword reading. Notes differences in reading comprehension were closely associated with differences in decoding skill. (SC)

Discusses development and implementation of an approach to decoding in which students use words they know to decode those they do not know. Discusses how an analogy approach was implemented in a tutorial setting. Offers guidelines for how the approach can be used in regular classrooms, including whole language classrooms. (RS)