This study examines the specific recommendations of prominent educators and student readers of the nineteenth century regarding word recognition instruction and the varied activities which support such instruction. In the nineteenth century books, the authors examine all explicit instructions to the teachers in both front and end matter and then…

In a test-driven educational environment, teachers see a great need for more engaging resources that produce the literacy results needed for students to thrive academically. In 2015, The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that only 36% of fourth graders scored at or above the Proficient level of reading. This statistic was…

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…

In this study, the student texts and teacher guides of two reading intervention programs for at-risk, first-grade students were analyzed and compared: Fountas and Pinnell's "Leveled Literacy Intervention" (LLI) and Scott Foresman's "My Sidewalks" (MS). The analyses drew on the framework of available theory and…

The authors used a multiple-baseline-across-behaviors (i.e., word lists) design to evaluate a computer-based flashcard intervention on automatic sight-word reading in a 4th-grade student with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities. Immediately after the intervention was applied to each of three lists of sight words, the student made rapid…

The present study used two letter detection tasks, the classic missing letter effect paradigm and a single word versus familiar word compound version of this paradigm, to study bottom-up and top-down processes involved in reading in normally achieving as compared to low achieving elementary school readers. The research participants were children…

Teaching students how to read is one of the most important tasks in elementary schools. The majority of schools use published basal programs to teach students to read. Several published reviews have indicated that past editions of basal readers did not align with appropriate instruction for beginning level readers. In this study I reviewed five of…

Argues that proponents of the sight method must reevaluate some of their advice to teachers in light of recent research. (RB)

The research reported here was designed to examine a number of factors that findings from verbal learning studies indicate should affect the recall and transfer of word identification materials. Sight word and phonics-based or rule-based learning were investigated in 112 kindergarteners who were identified as nonreaders. Groups were trained on…

This paper reviews research on children's use of contextual cues in reading, and reports on a study which explored the contextual sensitivity and word recognition behavior of 108 beginning readers from grades 1, 2, and 3. (CM)

An intense debate exists around the most beneficial and successful method for teaching young children how to read. On the one side is sight-reading or the look-say method which promotes learning to read by immediate recognition of words learned through "memorization." In contrast to the sight method, the phonics method aims at teaching…

Concludes that the sight method of teaching reading is discredited by recent research findings. (RB)

Lists a basic sight vocabulary of 96 irregularly spelled words which should be taught through visual memory techniques. (MKM)

Short, sight-word vocabulary lists derived from the spontaneous speech of four different groups of children are compared with the vocabulary in six beginning reading series. Very high levels of agreement were found for function, but not for content, words. (JMF)

Shows two major handicaps in the anti-phonics movement which suggest that the future of the movement is doubtful: (1) the demonstrable weakness in both the theory and method of anti-phonics; (2) the increasing confidence that publishes and editors of widely used basal readers are placing in phonics. (BF/JH)