The skills listed in this booklet may form the base guideline for organizing the total school reading program or for individual classroom teachers. Several reasons are listed for constructing a reading program around a sequential listing of skills: (1) an orderly arrangement, (2) diagnosis, (3) blueprint for organizing flexible groups, (4) goal…

The importance of word analysis skills to reading ability is discussed, and methodologies for teaching such skills are examined. It is stated that a child cannot become proficient in reading if he does not master the skill of associating printed letter symbols with the sounds they represent. Instructional procedures which augment the alphabet with…

The word-identification approach has long been the basis for teaching reading in both native and second languages. Recent work has a new approach, particularly that of Frank Smith, who developed a feature analysis model of reading. As we can identify letters in different configurations or before all the strokes are completed, so can we identify…

First graders taught with the initial teaching alphabet showed superior word recognition when compared with matched subjects taught in the traditional English alphabet instructional format. Retesting in third grade showed no significant differences between the groups, but indicated that auditory memory affected reading performance in both…

Available from: Council for Exceptional Children, 1920 Association Drive, Reston, Virginia 22091. Compared were the effects of three instructional strategies on the reading comprehension of six 9- to 11-year-old learning disabled students in a resource program. (BD)

Poor readers often know only the most common meanings or nuances of multimeaning (polysemic) words frequently encountered in reading materials. Teacher-directed, systematic vocabulary instruction must focus on specific problem areas. A three-step plan for teaching multimeaning words is proposed, emphasizing recognition and classification of word…

Investigates whether dyslexic children use word identification processes which are qualitatively different from those used by normal readers at the same stage of reading acquisition. Results suggest that dyslexics and normal readers use essentially the same processes to recognize words, but may differ in knowledge of correspondence rules. (RWB)

Describes two experiments that examined word recognition processes of second, fourth, and sixth graders. Shows that older children use meaning frequency to narrow the amount of information kept active following word recognition. (HOD)

Provides methods teachers can use to help remedial readers attack both monosyllabic and multisyllabic words they do not recognize. (FL)

Compared comprehension of kindergarten-age precocious readers (who read at the third-grade level) with second- and third-grade-age children. Results on measures of letter, scrambled word, and text reading times indicated that, for precocious readers, efficiency in lower-order tasks is not a prerequisite for rapid text reading and good…

Discusses the use of analogy strategies, which involve comparing word parts to other known words, to teach reading. Reports on a study that showed positive effects from teaching analogy strategies to second-grade students and to learning disabled fifth-grade students. (FL)

First-, second-, and third-grade readers were asked to pick items that differed in terms of a rule-governed description of orthographic structure. Task performance improved with school experience. Reading ability was positively correlated with knowledge of orthographic structure for young readers. (Author/PN)

A comparison of the self-selected reading words of a group of preschool children to the words in the first reading books of four widely used basal reading series reveals that the children's self-selected words are more imagery-loaded than the words in the readers. (FL)

Reports on a study in which high and low ability elementary school students pronounced synthetic words exemplifying certain phoneme grapheme correspondences. Compares these pronunciations to principle pronunciations indicated from type counts of letters and clusters appearing in a selected word corpus. Concludes that the technique led to greater…

To investigate reasoning capacities involved in learning to read, a Test of Multiple Seriation (from Piaget) was developed. Problems of a test used by Lunzer and Dolan are discussed. Results showed that word recognition and reading comprehension at age nine correlate significantly with multiple seriation, independent of IQ. (Editor/SJL)