As part of a larger effort to develop a test battery for diagnosing difficulties with various word recognition subskills among mainstreamed students in grades 2 through 5, four experiments were conducted to compare the abilities of good and poor readers to read a frequency-graduated series of irregularly spelled words first in isolation and then in meaningful context. In the first two experiments, 106 children in an urban public school were asked to read aloud a list of words of graduated frequency and irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences, and also to read aloud 50 sentences, each containing a test word. Results showed that word recognition was significantly aided by the presence of meaningful context for both poor and good readers. The data also indicated that context assisted recognition most for words of intermediate familiarity, that words of greater familiarity were reliably recognized without context, and that words of lesser familiarity were not recognized even with context. The third and fourth experiments replicated the tasks with children from a suburban school district. Results, while quantitatively superior, were qualitatively similar to those obtained in the first two experiments. (The complete tests are included.) (HOD)