When young children of Color from minoritized communities read decodable readers mandated by their school districts, children approach reading the texts with the expectation that the texts will make sense. While decodable readers allow children to apply their knowledge of phonics skills in context to support their word recognition, they tend to…

The authors report findings from an evaluation of the reading competence of students in selected elementary schools in Trinidad and Tobago. The work was conducted in eight schools and involved the testing of 450 students in standards (grades) 1 and 5 for competence in comprehension, oral reading, and word recognition. Methods and results relating…

According to interpretations of results from the latest oral reading fluency (ORF) study conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (White et al., 2020), fourth-grade students who score below the basic standard require interventions that focus on word recognition, phonological decoding, and fluency. Before such mandates for…

Envisioning oneself as a competent reader is an important first step to reading well. This article describes an intervention that employs drawings coupled with teacher-student dialogue, which sets the stage for strategy learning as a key to word-solving. A process for the interventionist, Title I or any teacher working with students who find…

Two struggling fourth-grade readers with learning disabilities who have severe deficits in word recognition, comprehension, and reading fluency improve their reading skills using a method that combines intensive word study with the timed repeated reading of poetry. The direct instruction included semantics, morphology, orthography, and…

The purpose of this article is to describe a strategy called the Poetry Academy used to boost reading skills in elementary school students. The Poetry Academy paired struggling readers with a community volunteer to read poetry on a weekly schedule to practice fluency, work on word recognition abilities, and build confidence. A research study took…

Concludes that as little phonics instruction as is necessary should be presented to help the learner achieve increasing independence in the various coding tasks. (RB)

Describes a strategy to teach early readers to look for smaller words that they know within a large word they do not know. (SR)

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

Discusses the importance of speech skills as antecedents to learning word perception skills in beginning reading. (RB)

Suggests methods of direct instruction, such as a commercial kit, for developing student ability to use context clues in reading. (RL)

Analyzes six ideas related to language experience intended to improve the teaching of reading. (RB)

Suggests that perceptual problems may account for the difficulty young children experience in recognizing words. (RB)

Investigates context effects on children's reading accuracy when reading words in a story context and from a word list. Notes that although many children read words in context which they could not read from lists, this result did not apply to good readers. (MM)

Concludes that preschool children know that print conveys information, yet frequently use environmental cues rather than letter knowledge when they appear to read. (FL)