Notes that to work at the cutting edge of children's reading development, primary-grade teachers need to consider some important questions about materials and curriculum. Discusses why word-recognition prompts are important, describes research on word-recognition prompts, and discusses teachers' materials and word-recognition prompts. Considers…

Describes Marie Clay's word boxes that help children attend to phonological and orthographic features of words, developing phonemic awareness and improving word recognition and spelling. Describes a study showing that the use of word boxes with several elementary school students with learning disabilities was effective for improving and…

Describes Strategy Access Rods (SARs), balsa-wood, prism-like or rectangular rods on which a one-sentence reading strategy phrase in the first person is printed. Notes SARs serve as a visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile reminder of the strategies available to developing readers. Discusses use of SARs for word recognition and comprehension.…

Contains suggestions from six contributors, including the use of parents as an audience for beginning readers; outdoor activities to motivate readers; word order recognition exercise; a books-by-mail library service for rural students; using remedial students to read to younger children; and a language arts/social studies project. (FL)

Updates a list (originally published in 1963) of "survival" or essential words--words so important for survival and success in everyday life that everyone should know them. Notes that recognition of these key words and phrases may require non-English-speaking individuals, disabled readers, and adult literacy students to use rote memorization for…

Offers strategies to use when students are not able to achieve a high level of accuracy in story reading. (FL)

Explains six tasks which require comprehension of words and which can be used to teach beginning readers. (MKM)

Suggests that automaticity in decoding, a prerequisite for skilled reading, results from direct instruction in decoding skills and extended practice in comfortable reading materials. (ARH)

Describes a method of increasing vocabulary recognition of Chapter 1 elementary students by using mastery words from basal programs, sight word cards, and modified cloze stories. (MG)

Presents a seven-step technique for teaching primary school students to recognize function words. Describes a method for eliciting parent help in the task and offers suggestions for review and follow-up activities. (FL)

Suggests a variety of class activities using word banks. (MKM)

Suggests teaching a compare/contrast method of word identification rather than teaching syllabication rules to decode words and describes research investigating this technique. (MKM)

Examines some problems and techniques for teaching prefixes and suffixes at the middle elementary level. States that fewer affixes should be taught, while emphasizing the application of affix knowledge to unfamiliar words. Lists the most common prefixes and suffixes in printed school English for grades three to nine. (MM)

Describes how the author worked with one struggling reader to help him learn to make balanced and consistent use of different cues for word identification (graphophonic cues, how words look, grammatical appropriateness of words, sentence meaning, or background knowledge). (SR)

Describes a strategy to teach early readers to look for smaller words that they know within a large word they do not know. (SR)