This study examines claims regarding the benefits of systematic and explicit phonics programs by comparing literature-based programs with commercial phonics-based programs to determine which best supports second grades' reading strategies and comprehension. Students in literature-based programs performed comparably in their use of graphophonics…

Theoretical considerations of phoneme construction were explored and a study was made of phoneme efficiency for deaf communication in Finland which utilized 128 deaf pupils (77 boys and 51 girls from grades 3 to 8 and from ages 8 to 15). The main factors of defective production were found in visual reception. It was concluded that, on the average,…

Administrators in the U.S. education system need to be more than good managers, they need to understand high-quality reading instruction, so they can serve their teachers and help their school meet Reading First requirements. Although written with the administrator in mind, this collection also can be used by teachers, teacher educators, staff…

Twenty first grade children were videotaped during their first six weeks of learning to read in a study of the modified synthetic phonics program and the four progressive stages of oral reading behavior (emergence, contextual, nonresponse, and postresponse). The approach used by the teacher emphasized learning new words through the concurrent…

A literature survey to determine problems American Indians experience with English focused on problems solvable through computer presentation of materials. Recommendations included practice in selected minimally contrasting vowel pairs/consonant pairs, final consonants/consonant clusters, irregular plural nouns, verb tense forms, determiners,…

Twenty-four first-graders who were taught reading skills using the "Language Basics: Elementary" program, which incorporates the Orton-Gillingham-based Alphabetic Phonics Method, made statistically significant gains in phonological awareness, decoding, and reading comprehension. Thirty-two controls taught with the Houghton-Mifflin Basal…

This What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) topic report addresses reading interventions for students in grades K-3, including core reading curricula, programs, or products to be used as supplements to other reading instruction, programs that focus on staff development, and literacy software. The WWC review on beginning reading focuses on programs…

This guide highlights problems Vietnamese speakers are likely to have in learning English because of differences between the two languages and suggests ways of helping Vietnamese students of English over difficulties caused by these differences. The first section of the guide provides an overview of the Vietnamese language: the alphabet, word…

This guide to reading instruction for elementary and middle school students with learning difficulties covers a wide variety of practical instructional strategies founded in research and proven effective in classrooms. An introductory chapter notes the growing national emphasis on reading skills, especially research-based reading programs and the…

This study examined the word-structure knowledge of novice teachers and the progress of children tutored by a subgroup of the teachers. Teachers' word-structure knowledge was assessed using three tasks: graphophonemic segmentation, classification of pseudowords by syllable type, and classification of real words as phonetically regular or…

Designed to add to the existing knowledge base concerning the saliency of features used by children to identify isolated words, a study examined whether the method of instruction influences the extent to which various features are used for word identification and recall. Subjects, 117 kindergarten students from a suburban Buffalo, New York, school…

This report outlines the results from the Nebraska's Reading First initiative. Three thousand six hundred students from Kindergarten to Third grade were included in the project. Results indicated significant growth across all demographic groups. Student performance in the earlier grades has shown great promise for the following years. Growth in…

This book describes the processing styles inherent in dyslexia and dysgraphia for teacher identification of such students and provides strategies and compensations for students with these disabilities. Strategies for dyslexia and dysgraphia are combined in this book because both of these processing differences are language-based and represent a…

Experimental second language acquisition research typically investigates the effectiveness of instruction in terms of overall group gains. A particular instructional method may not, however, benefit all learners uniformly. This study, conducted in a New Zealand secondary school, establishes whether there is any relationship between the…

This book presents state-of-the-science research on the components of successful literacy learning and how to target them in contemporary classrooms. The volume builds on and extends the work of Steven Stahl, whose pioneering contributions encompassed the key areas of phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and assessment.…