Compiled by elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers, this guide describes activities for developing students' skills in phonics and structural word analysis. For each activity, a purpose or objective is stated, required materials are listed, specific teaching procedures are outlined, and the intended grade level (kindergarten,…

The word sort is a technique which capitalizes upon a child's natural feature analysis abilities. In a word sort the learner physically arranges words printed on small cards into groups. This technique can be used in many ways to help children draw conclusions about how words are related. There are two types of sorts: in "closed sorts"…

Describes a method, developed to make vocabulary learning a creative challenge, that consists of a four-step learning process that makes the student responsible for selecting words to learn daily. (Author/AM)

Outlines a taxonomy of reading comprehension skills that teachers can use to develop questioning techniques that are flexible enough to reflect the nature of the reading materials. (RL)

Discusses the uses and advantages of pictorial schemata in teaching vocabulary to second language learners. The advantages are that the learner is encouraged not only to deal with lexical ordering but also to look for such ordering when learning the language outside the classroom. Describes how to design a schemata. (SED)

Describes semantic mapping, an effective strategy for vocabulary instruction that involves the categorical structuring of information in graphic form and requires students to relate new words to their own experience and prior knowledge. (HOD)

Specifies some of the different word learning tasks students face, describes different levels of word knowledge, notes three types of costs involved in instruction, and discusses the costs and benefits of some specific methods of vocabulary instruction. (HOD)

Creative ways of teaching alphabetizing, spelling, identifying parts of speech, and using reference works are offered. (DF)

Describes a reading technique for college writing and a method of teaching word structue. (HOD)

Concludes that when children learned confusable words, their subsequent learning of words was at a faster rate than those children who learned nonconfusable words first, and that high imagery words were learned more quickly than low imagery ones. (FL)

Notes that teaching techniques used to "build" vocabulary are not based on the ways most people acquire vocabulary. Discusses the problems and possibilities of expanding students' language usage. (RL)

This article applies research findings to the teaching of phonics, and outlines four instructional steps: (1) introduce letter-sound correspondence in isolation, (2) teach students to blend sounds to read words, (3) provide immediate feedback on oral reading errors, and (4) provide extensive practice. (JDD)

A team of first-grade teachers began to question their literacy/phonics program, which used a whole-class format for instruction. The teachers felt that teaching the whole class did not allow them to meet the diverse needs of all their students. One of the teachers introduced the rest of the team to developmental-spelling research (i.e., research…