Discusses a number of current documents that reflect the renewed role of phonics in beginning reading instruction. (TO)

Five reproducible puzzles are presented which test students' skills in math, visual discrimination, and decoding. (MT)

The normal readers were able to read significantly more regular real words and nonsense words than were the learning disabled children. It was concluded that reading disabled children experience specific difficulty in learning to use the phonetic code to unlock unknown words. (Author/CL)

Tests the hypothesis that the ability to decode words is facilitated if the beginning reader is taught only one sound per letter, the one sound associated with the letter being treated as an overgeneralization. Subjects were five pairs of four-year-old monozygotic twins. (Author/RH)

Differences in visual encoding speed for reading is related to differences in ability to access memory codes for other meaningful patterns. This difference is shown in the advantage of better readers in reaction time in deciding if two line drawings belonged to the same category. Better readers have faster access for any meaningful pattern. (PJM)

Suggests ways of creating simple or complex seeing-thinking activities which develop students' predictive behaviors. (DD)

Argues that problems identified with using phonics do not attack the skill, per se, which phonics provides--being able to independently unlock words. (HOD)

Decisions about whether pairs of letter strings are both words or not are faster for semantically related words than unrelated words. Two experiments showed the semantic relatedness effect is greatly reduced when orthographically illegal, unpronounceable strings were used as negative items. Lexical decisions involve options on codes representing…

Considers how spelling instruction tends to become much more focused on correcting and rewriting text. Explores how educators can develop students' spelling ability in the middle grades, conceptualizing spelling more broadly than the traditional focus on spelling as part of the editing/proofreading phase of writing. (SG)

We report evidence for dissociation between explicit and implicit access to word representations in a deep dyslexic patient (JO). JO read aloud a series of ambiguous (e.g., bank) and unambiguous (e.g., food) words and performed a lexical decision task using these same items. When required to explicitly access the items (i.e., naming), JO showed…

Evidence strongly suggests that shared book reading at home and in preschool is important for young children's development of the foundational skills required for the eventual mastery of decoding and comprehension. Yet the nuances of how learning from book reading might vary across these contexts and with children's skills are not well understood.…

This study investigated the associations of oral language and reading skills with a sample of 282 Spanish-speaking English language learners across 3 years of elementary school. In the 3rd grade, the English and Spanish decoding measures formed two distinct but highly related factors, and the English and Spanish oral language measures formed two…

A multiple-baseline across participants was used to analyze the effects of adding multisensory elements to an explicit, systematic phonics program on the reading achievement of six students identified as treatment resisters. Participants were given 10 minutes of daily instruction in the supplemental program in addition to instruction in the…

This prospective study examined early first-language (L1) predictors of later second-language (L2) reading (word decoding, comprehension) and spelling skills by conducting a series of multiple regressions. Measures of L1 word decoding, spelling, reading comprehension, phonological awareness, receptive vocabulary, and listening comprehension…

The purpose of the experiments was to determine the automatic use of large or small word reading units in young readers in the absence of word decoding strategies. Picture-word Stroop interference was examined from four types of conflicting labels: (a) words containing both highly predictable grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) units and highly…