The author reviews theory and research by Ehri and her colleagues to document how a scientific approach has been applied over the years to conduct controlled studies whose findings reveal how beginners learn to read words in and out of text. Words may be read by decoding letters into blended sounds or by predicting words from context, but the way…

Recently, there has been growing concern about how to most effectively support the literacy development of beginning and struggling readers with regard to helping them learn to effortlessly identify the huge number of words that proficient readers ultimately learn to read with automaticity. Some, noting the critical importance of phonics…

Controversies over the best way to teach word recognition in beginning reading instruction have raged for generations. The goal has been to acquire automatic skills for recoding written language into speech. At this time, a popular theory suggests that phonics is better than the look-and-say method; however the evidence does not support this…

Factors were investigated under acquisition and retention conditions which might be expected to counteract interference brought on by mixing sight and phonics methods. Experiment 1 dealt with training kindergarten children to attend to and encode letter pattern cues and the word's contextual cues. Subjects were trained individually in a series of…

Phonics has been taught from the time of the ancient Greeks to make the written language more accessible. The first task of learning to read is learning to recognize in print the language used in speech. As a result of many studies conducted during the 1960s which demonstrated the effectiveness of phonics, its use as an instructional method…

The primary purpose of this study was to provide empirical evidence for the assumption that if the essential subskills of word attack are mastered, then functional word attack ability will result. To obtain such evidence, the study was designed to test the functional word attack ability of 140 elementary school students who had been taught the…

Analysis of research on reading instruction for children with moderate mental retardation indicated that word analysis instruction is a feasible option; word analysis is the most effective method of oral reading error correction; and the strongest sight-word instruction methods include those that use picture integration, constant delay, and the…

A series of articles with the chief emphasis on phonics as a means of analyzing words is presented. Various articles pertain to elementary, secondary, and college level instruction. The first of the five parts into which the volume is divided is comprised of a single article which gives an excellent overview of the field of word recognition. Part…

The 50 most frequently occurring words found in primary level reading materials were taught to kindergarten pupils using three different teaching methods. Neither methodology nor frequency of occurrence affected the relative learning difficulty of sight words. The study is the second investigation in a series. (SB)

This bulletin summarizes and interprets some of the main findings of "Survey of the Literature on Methods and Materials in Reading," by Martha J. Maxwell and George Temp, Chapter IV of "The Information Base for Reading: A Critical Review of the Information Base for Current Assumptions Regarding the Status of Instruction and Achievement in Reading…