Description of a tutoring program for struggling 1st grade readers focuses on use of Sound Partners, a program designed for non-teacher tutors. This program emphasizes basic phonological awareness and phonological reading skills. The article describes the program's theoretical ancestry, application, research outcomes, and obstacles/solutions…

Stresses the importance of the development of phonemic awareness skills for students with reading difficulties. Research suggesting phonemic awareness may be a more powerful predictor for reading progress than IQ is noted. Insets offer specific phonological awareness assessment tasks and corresponding phonological awareness instructional tasks.…

Cross-validates the Simple View of Reading using a sample of children with English as their first language. Support the idea that reading comprehension ability can be decomposed into decoding and listening comprehension abilities, but does not support the assumption that most of the substantive variance in reading comprehension can be explained by…

Discusses the role of word recognition in reading comprehension. Defines seven strategies for word recognition--configuration, dictionary analysis, syllabication, structural analysis, sight words, context clues, and phonetic analysis--and provides activities for teaching each. (JPB)

Investigated whether kindergarten students who played Sony PlayStation educational video games for 40 minutes daily for 11 weeks learned better than peers who did not play such games. Found that the experimental group gained significantly more than the control group in spelling and decoding on the Wide Range Achievement Test-R3. Found no…

Reflects on "Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children," a report from the National Academy of Sciences that centers on phonological awareness, decoding, word recognition, and literal comprehension. Reframes the report from the perspective of the New Literacy Studies, which takes a sociocultural approach. Stresses tensions…

Identifies subgroups of children with reading disabilities using the regression method--children who were poor in phonological, compared to orthographic, word decoding were identified as phonological-type participants, and children who were poor in orthographic, compared to phonological, decoding were identified as surface-type participants.…

Multiple regression methods were used to examine continuous variation in component reading subskills and their underlying cognitive skills within a group of 9 to 15-year-old children. Results are discussed within a connectionist framework that views the decoding deficit in dyslexia as stemming from poorly specified phonological representations.…

This article proposes a neurobiological account of reading and reading disability suggesting that for normally developing readers, the dorsal (tempo-parietal) circuit predominates at first, and in conjunction with premotor systems, is associated with analytic processing necessary for learning to integrate orthographic with phonological and…

This introductory article to a special issue of case studies shows the diversity of students with severe reading disabilities. It notes that poor readers often have difficulties in one or more of three areas: decoding, recognizing words automatically, and reading text fluently, all linked to weaknesses in rapid naming of visually presented items.…

This study examined, via structural equation modeling, early predictors of children's 8 year reading, decoding and 10 year comprehension at later school age. Maternal verbal scaffolding indirectly influenced both decoding and comprehension, through its support of children's language abilities at 3 and 4 years of age. Additionally, there was a…

With the publication of the report of the National Reading Panel (National Institute for Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], 2000), reading fluency has become more recognized as a key element in successful reading programs in the primary grades. This article describes a study that assessed the decoding accuracy and fluency levels of a…

After instituting a successful K-2 reading program at the Family Academy in Harlem, the authors of this article faced a new challenge. They set out to learn everything they could about reading comprehension, which they realized was the key to expanding their older students' knowledge of the world. They developed a K-2 reading program. It was…

Two experiments were carried out to explore the units of analysis used by children to read Dutch bisyllabic pseudowords. Although Dutch orthography is highly regular, several deviations from a one-to-one correspondence occur. In polysyllabic words, the grapheme e may represent three different vowels: /e/, /e/, or [/schwa/]. In Experiment 1, Grade…

What do first-grade teachers do and say to scaffold novice readers? To answer that question, this teacher researcher videotaped her own and others' scaffolding behaviors. Analysis of the video transcripts reveals valuable information that can support teachers or tutors as they work with beginning readers. Video data show how first-grade teachers…