Increasingly alarmed by instructional mandates more founded on journalistic rhetoric and popular opinion than on research findings or practitioner expertise, researchers gathered survey data from teachers to better understand the status of K-2 phonics instruction. Data demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of these K-2 teachers teach phonics,…

Although the importance of literacy instruction has remained constant since the beginning of the new millennium, literacy trends have shifted, often alongside acts of legislation. Areas of literacy education that were once overlooked in the past like adolescent literacy and RTI are now receiving increased attention, whereas areas of literacy like…

In order to systemically improve student achievement in elementary literacy, a large urban school district partnered with a local university to develop a model for high-quality professional development that hopefully would result in long-term changes in teachers' literacy instructional/practices. Schools were selected based on their Adequate…

The purpose of this article is to describe how teachers can foster strategic reading processes in their early literacy classrooms, and how to incorporate a Strategy Perception Interview to assist in documenting students' use and perceptions of these strategies. Descriptions of classroom instruction incorporating literacy strategies and…

Concludes that intensive phonics teaching produces greater beginning reading achievement than do reading programs that deemphasize phonics teaching. (FL)

Briefly discusses research on consonant substitution and presents a five-step teaching strategy to help beginning readers use the words they know to figure out the words they don't know. (JM)

Questions the usefulness of lists of the most frequently used words in reading instruction, and recommends that teachers develop good phonics skills in young pupils and that teachers adopt the psycholinguistic approach to reading. (JM)

Reviews the history of phonics and whole word instruction, arguing that students' reading proficiency does benefit from learning fundamentals of phonics. (HTH)

Explores the effectiveness of "word boxes" phonics instruction on beginning first-grade children's word identification and spelling performance. Finds that children in the word boxes condition significantly outperformed children in a more traditional phonics condition. Indicates that word boxes lessons can be a viable phonics approach to…

Updates T. Clymer's 1963 phonic generalization study by largely rewriting consonant generalizations. Consonants in 17,211 words from the Stanford Spelling Word List were analyzed and Clymer's 45 rules reduced to three, which predict consonant situations with 99 percent accuracy. (SRT).

Provides a look at primary grade children's abilities, inabilities, and requirements to use phonics as a beginning reading strategy and suggests a model that facilitates children's application of phonics while reading. (FL)

Investigates the validity of the assumption that prerequisite skills to reading competence have been identified; presents a study based on student test scores and a survey of teachers' evaluations of these students. (Survey responses are appended.) (MAI)

Describes a study that examined perceptions of reading in terms of both developmental characteristics and implications for reading instruction. (HOD)

Concludes that fourth-grade children were able to apply more phonics terms than they could define and that high ability readers could define more terms than could low level readers. (FL)

CD-ROM storybooks can support the development of the five essential elements of reading instruction identified by The National Reading Panel: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Specific features inherent in these texts, audio pronunciation of text, embedded vocabulary definitions and animated graphics can be used…