This study examines the specific recommendations of prominent educators and student readers of the nineteenth century regarding word recognition instruction and the varied activities which support such instruction. In the nineteenth century books, the authors examine all explicit instructions to the teachers in both front and end matter and then…

In this study we examined the effectiveness of a reading intervention targeting a group of 24 struggling readers in ten primary schools in Ireland. The intervention consisted of two components; component one consisted of 15-20 minutes delivery of the Toe-by-Toe programme (a well established systematic synthetic phonics programme) and the second…

Although the recent publication of the Rose Report appears to draw a line in the sand that privileges synthetic phonics over other methods in the UK, history indicates a pendulum swing of preference between whole-word and phonics since the advent of mass education. Suggesting that the current "victory" for exponents of synthetic phonics…

States that in the 1970s, sight words existed in a "topsy-turvy world" in which the variety of definitions was confusing. Suggests that readers recognize sight words as single, holistic units without segmenting and attending to letters one at a time, and without sounding out and blending letters sequentially. Explains the connection…

Comparison of 80 beginning first graders, half receiving phonics instruction and half receiving whole word instruction, found, for both groups, those above grade level in reading excelled in phonological recoding and application of grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules while those below grade level applied visual-orthographic knowledge more than…

Fifteen regular grade 2 teachers used a set of 150 written lessons that were designed to develop, over the course of a school year, low and normally achieving students' ability to decode by analogy (i.e., to read unknown words using known words). The lessons provided (1) a planned sequence for teaching phonic elements including common spelling…

The Discrepancy Hypothesis posits that children early in the acquisition process read visually (holistically) and spell phonologically. This claim was examined and rejected. We investigated reading and spelling in Grade 1 and Grade 2 children using controlled non-word and word materials with a variety of orthographic patterns. While reading and…

The beginning reading method explained in this book combines a phonics approach with a sight word/basal reader approach, a method which the author used during her many years in the classroom. The author has found that children can become independent readers in two to four months and may read from 10 to 200 books independently in the first year.…

Intended to help dispel several unsupported "myths" about reading instruction, this book analyzes a selected group of teaching practices that have been supported by reading experts but not by research findings. The "myths" discussed in the first 12 chapters of the book are as follows: (1) phonics hinders comprehension; (2) unpredictable spelling…