In fall of 2019, the EdWeek Research Center set out to gain a clearer sense of nationwide teacher and teacher education perceptions and practices by sending out two surveys about topics related to early reading instruction, especially as it related to phonics. One survey was taken by 674 K-2 and elementary special education teachers who indicated…

Research with 32 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old British children demonstrated that children at different reading levels relied on different types of cues in recognizing words. Older children used grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules in recognizing words and were much more flexible than were beginning readers in their response patterns. (SLD)

Describes a study of the visual discrimination abilities of children who varied in their ability to recognize words. Indicates that visual discrimination skills of the type needed to discriminate between single artificial graphemes do not seem essential for the word recognition aspect of reading. (TJ)

Examines the effects of onset and rime awareness on children's recognition of spelling patterns in written words. Reports that onset-rime awareness was associated with word ending similarities, whereas word beginning analogies appeared to involve higher-level phonological skills. Suggests longitudinal research regarding the issue. (SG)

Describes a study which tested the notion that phonological recoding in important during reading acquisition. Children who had no measurable phonological recoding skills were matched to 28 children who had some skills in this domain and compared on reading performance at the end of grades one and two. Those with phonological recoding skills were…

Reports two experiments supporting the hypothesis that with reading experience, children identify the systematic relationship between pronunciation and orthographic structure and utilize that knowledge in the pronunciation of unfamiliar words. (HTH)

Concludes that the regularity effect is phonologically, not orthographically, mediated; that good readers use a predominantly phonological strategy in lexical decisions, while poor readers do not; and that for the best readers-spellers, orthographically and phonologically irregular words have a special status, allowing them to gain fast and…

Submits that children recognize their first words in a different way than they later decode. Compares the hypothesis that sight words are recognized as wholes to the hypothesis that sight words are recognized as parts. Finds support for the idea that first words are recognized by "selective association." (BS)

Compares how third- and fifth-grade learning-disabled and non-learning-disabled students use orthographic cues and contextual information during oral and silent reading. Finds that reliance on orthographic cues was consistently more pronounced in the oral than in the silent condition for all groups. Finds differences for students with and without…

Describes Marie Clay's word boxes that help children attend to phonological and orthographic features of words, developing phonemic awareness and improving word recognition and spelling. Describes a study showing that the use of word boxes with several elementary school students with learning disabilities was effective for improving and…

Misspellings by first through fifth grade students were classified as to probable underlying spelling strategies. An overall shift strategy from sound to print was reflected in fifth grade errors independent of word difficulty. (FL)

A study was conducted to investigate the ability of children to determine meanings of derived words that have undergone a pronunciation shift while retaining a close orthographic relationship to their base words. A researcher-designed test was constructed using derived words that had their base word included in a "core list" of words at or below…

Children with reading and/or spelling difficulties were examined to test ability to read and spell using correspondence rules and whole-word rules. Children deficient in both reading and spelling skills had difficulties using correspondence rules to spell and read and difficulties with whole-word reading and spelling. (Author/DB)

A study involving 17 fourth graders identified as poor readers found the strongest predictors of work attack skills were phonological awareness and grammatical judgment. The combination of phonological awareness, grammatical judgment, phoneme manipulation, and rapid naming of digits accounted for more than half of the variance in word recognition.…

A highly reproducible scale of difficulty of word identification tasks was identified for both good and poor readers: consonant-vowel combinations and short vowel words were learned first. Long vowel words, special rule words, and nonsense words were more difficult. Reading instruction should parallel this sequence since it follows learning…