Stop for a moment and wonder: what's happening in your brain right now--as you read this paragraph? How much do you know about the innumerable and amazing connections that your mind is making as you, in a flash, make sense of this request? "Why does it matter?" "The Reading Mind" is a brilliant, beautifully crafted, and…

Beginning readers and struggling readers need explicit, systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics (Adams, 2008; Ehri,1992, 1998; Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Schuster, & Yaghoub-Zadeh, 2001; Gaskins et al., 1997; Moats, 2004; Morris, 2015; National Reading Panel, 2000; Reutzel, 2015). Ehri and McCormick's (2008) phases of word learning…

Some researchers believe that phonics is the more natural way to teach reading because, instead of requiring the learner to memorize whole words, phonics shows the learner the process by which alphabetic writing is converted into speech. The human baby babbles more than enough phonemes for any language. Before there was an alphabet, humans drew…

Undergraduates learned to read words spelled with novel letters under phonics or whole-word conditions through several overlearning trials, and vocalization latency of word recognition responses was measured. Whole-word instruction resulted in word recognition mechanisms similar to fully automated mechanisms, but phonics instruction did not.…

Controversies over the best way to teach word recognition in beginning reading instruction have raged for generations. The goal has been to acquire automatic skills for recoding written language into speech. At this time, a popular theory suggests that phonics is better than the look-and-say method; however the evidence does not support this…

Traces the trends in reading instruction, and proposes that reading be taught according to the Quantity Reading Method in which students are given a brief course in reading skills, followed by opportunities to read widely and quantitatively. References. (VJ)

Three scanning/encoding training conditions were compared with a control condition in transfer tasks involving learning and recognizing six minimally contrasting, single-syllable word-like forms. The scanning/encoding treatments failed to differ from the controls in prereading kindergarteners, which was attributed to the difficulty of the transfer…

This study was designed to investigate the differences in effectiveness in teaching sight words to kindergarten children by using words only (no-picture group), words and simple pictures (simple-picture group), and words and complex pictures (complex-picture group). The subjects were 30 kindergarten children selected from two kindergarten classes.…

Reports on two experiments that explore the comprehension difficulties of children with normal word recognition ability. Concludes that skilled readers engage in more constructive processing and that comprehension difficulties are not the result of a defective working memory. (SRT)

While previous studies have investigated children's awareness of two units within words--syllables and phonemes, there is experimental evidence that children are also aware of intrasyllabic units (units intermediate in size between the syllable and the phoneme), and that these units may be useful for teaching phonological awareness and reading.…

Three reading procedures for learning isolated words--whole-word, syllable-blending, and phonics-blending--were examined to determine which was the most effective for preschool children. The six preschool children in the study were divided into two groups to assess the effects of the length and number of different letters in a series of training…

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…

An experiment in the teaching of reading in Spanish to second- and third-grade students, conducted by the author at the Ethel Phillips elementary school, utilizes a modified version of Dr. Laubach's "syllabic, analytic-synthetic" method of language instruction. In this approach, vowels are combined in succession with each of the consonants to…

Intended for reading teachers and teacher educators, this book provides an analysis of 12 fallacious beliefs thought to be responsible for the perpetuation of ineffective and inappropriate approaches to reading instruction. The introduction looks at the dangers of the myths that underlie reading instruction, discusses how the myths arise out of an…

Based on the thesis that reading is not a passive process by which readers soak up words and information from the page, but an active process by which they predict, sample, and confirm or correct their hypotheses about the written text, this book is an introduction to the theories of the psycholinguistic nature of the reading process and reading…