This article first examines recent theoretical and empirical research on reading development and instruction in English-speaking countries. Then, a study is described that examines the effects of a synthetic phonics-emphasis Direct Instruction remedial reading program on the phonological processes of students, with teacher-identified serious reading problems, attending several Melbourne suburban schools. The 206 students (150 males and 56 females, mean age 9.7 years) were pre-tested on a battery of phonological tests, and assigned to the treatment condition or to a wait-list comparison group. The 134 students in the intervention group received the 65 lessons (in groups of up to 10) of the "Corrective Reading: Decoding" program from reading teachers at their schools. When compared with a similar cohort of 72 wait-list students from the same schools, the students made statistically significant and educationally large gains in the phonologically-related processes of word attack, phonemic awareness, and spelling, and statistically significant and moderately large gains in phonological recoding in lexical access, and phonological recoding in working memory. The study contributes to an understanding of the relationship between phonological processes and reading, and to an approach to efficiently assisting students whose underdeveloped decoding places their educational progress at risk. (Contains 5 figures and 3 tables.)