Students who display reading difficulties/disabilities at the end of third grade are less likely to succeed in content areas and graduate from high school than their reading-proficient peers. Literature suggests that students in rural school districts lag behind their suburban peers in terms of their reading levels and accessibility to resources.…

Results of two experiments involving kindergarten and first grade students indicate that oral blending of dictated sounds into consonant-vowel-consonant words was markedly and significantly better when no pauses intervened between sounds than when pauses of one or three seconds intervened. Interactions between pause interval and word familiarity…

A year-long study examined how phonics or whole word instruction affected first graders' progress in reading and spelling words. Subjects, 80 Houston, Texas students of average reading and intellectual abilities from three classrooms receiving phonics instruction and three classrooms receiving whole word instruction, were administered a phonemic…

The oral reading errors of 15 second graders were analyzed to find out if strategies used by good and poor readers could be differentiated. Patterns of errors were identified, and it was found that good readers often used context cues, while poor readers relied heavily on visual-phonic information. It was also possible to identify good and poor…

Experiments investigated the learning effects of two strategies (whole-word and segmented feedback) in beginning readers. Results from both experiments indicate whole-word sound feedback is more helpful than segmented feedback. (SM)

This study examined differences in oral reading strategies of 60 first-grade students attending school in two comparable Texas districts. One district provided beginning reading instruction through an eclectic basal approach; the second taught reading using a phonic emphasis approach. The Reading Miscue Inventory was used to analyze oral reading…

Forty first-grade and third-grade students participated in an investigation of differences between oral reading strategies of students taught with a phonics emphasis and those of students taught with an analytic-eclectic program. Results from analysis of a reading miscue inventory used with each student indicated that miscue patterns are directly…

This "how-to" booklet was compiled by Oklahoma's "Phonics Task Force" to help teachers of K-3 students further incorporate phonics into daily reading instruction using a systematic approach--one that is logical, sequential, and orderly. The booklet states that the use of phonics in Oklahoma's core curriculum has been promoted…

First-graders taught reading by phonics or language experience approach were compared on their ability to orally decode lists of words identified as either real or nonsense words. The two groups did not differ in overall correct responses, nor were their strategies influenced by the "real/nonsense" directions. (SJL)

Second-grade pupils using the Ginn "Reading 360" or the McGraw-Hill "Programmed Reading" were compared in their reading and retelling of the story "King Alfred and the Cakes." Analysis, using the Reading Miscue Inventory, of the performance of 20 selected pupils indicated that those taught with "Programmed…

Investigating how good and poor readers process words, a study examined the spelling and reading processes of 80 middle-class first grade students from three schools in Houston, Texas, 40 who were receiving whole word instruction, and 40 receiving phonics instruction. Based on scores from the Gates-McGinitie Reading Test, Basic R (administered in…

An extensive case history of instructional environment and acquisition of reading skills by 50 first-grade students in ten classrooms indicates that the rate at which students mastered decoding depended on classroom instruction with direct instruction appearing most profitable for children from low-socioeconomic backgrounds. (MKM)

The reading achievement of 376 second graders and the performances in oral reading and creative writing of 150 randomly selected subjects taught by three different methods were studied. All three approaches (basal reader, modified linguistic, and linguistic) were effective for reading instruction at the second-grade level. The largest differences…

A study was conducted to shed light on the influence which children's developmental stage in learning to read and the reading instruction they receive have on first-graders' reading concepts. The study provided descriptive information to answer the following questions: (1) Do children from literature-based and skill-based instructional settings…