Describes "Easy Steps to Reading Independence" (ESTRI), a new phonics-linguistics approach. Provides field study data that show statistically significant advantages for ESTRI in eight out of fourteen cases. (RL)

The second in a series of six articles on typewriting as a communication skill. Discusses the feasibility of utilizing the typewriter as a tool for corrective reading instruction and describes briefly some materials recently developed for this purpose. (HD)

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)

Nineteen first grade children were randomly assigned to two experimental reading instruction conditions lasting 12 weeks. Both conditions used the language experience approach to teaching beginning language. In the experimental stage, the language experience approach was augmented by a total of six hours of individualized word-bank activities.…

Kindergarten students were taught words with or without pictures to test the focal attention hypothesis that pictures interfere with sight-word learning. In this study, pictures presented with words facilitated rather than hindered learning. (MKM)

This training study combined within-subjects (N=12) comparisons of several literacy tasks with individual case studies of first and second graders with dyslexia over a five-month reading intervention. Training focused on phonological awareness, letter-sound associations, and guided reading. The children made significant gains in standard scores on…

New readers must be taught a variety of decoding skills to allow them to increase fluency and get on with the process of meaning making. Four of the most important strategies of decoding are: (1) using context clues; (2) developing a sight vocabulary of whole words; (3) analyzing the parts of words; and (4) attending to the letter-sound (phonics)…

Compilation of a list of the most common phrases used in reading was begun with the rationale that the quick recognition of phrases would facilitate reading comprehension. These first efforts showed that categorizing phrases by parts of speech did not provide acceptable levels of accuracy. The system that was effective, however, used a computer…

Factors were investigated under acquisition and retention conditions which might be expected to counteract interference brought on by mixing sight and phonics methods. Experiment 1 dealt with training kindergarten children to attend to and encode letter pattern cues and the word's contextual cues. Subjects were trained individually in a series of…

Using a personalized word association method, six children with persistent reading difficulties in two British elementary schools were instructed in recognizing 100 common words. All children made significant progress, with the most progress made by those who originally had the smallest sight vocabularies. Students who devised their own sentences…

Three youths with mental retardation and behavior disorders were taught functional sight words that supported participation in recreation activities in community settings. Direct instruction with in vivo word find activities was demonstrated to be effective in promoting acquisition of functional sight words. Word recognition was maintained at…