When young children of Color from minoritized communities read decodable readers mandated by their school districts, children approach reading the texts with the expectation that the texts will make sense. While decodable readers allow children to apply their knowledge of phonics skills in context to support their word recognition, they tend to…

Teachers in primary classrooms who are emphasizing high-level comprehension of complex texts are seeing young children hit comprehension thresholds that were previously only visible among older readers. However, most primary level reading interventions focus on word recognition skills or reading increasingly difficult leveled texts. This article…

Addressing beginning reading instruction in urban schools, this article proposes that a curriculum gap exists in many K-3 classrooms that operate under the guidelines of the No Child Left Behind Act and Reading First. The authors make a case for the inclusion of systematic and sustained instruction in comprehension, content knowledge, and writing…

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…

Examines how different types of word recognition instruction appeared to affect students with different early literacy foundations. Finds differences in instructional practices to be related to growth in reading. Identifies four classroom practices that seemed to have the greatest success with children entering first grade with minimal reading…

Students who received phonics and word recognition instruction directly from a teacher developed a more positive attitude toward reading than did students who received instruction through tape-recorded lessons. (MKM)

Suggests that children's writing is an excellent source of pertinent information about spelling and word recognition skills and analyzes one child's writing to demonstrate how an analysis of misspellings might proceed and how information obtained might be used to direct future instruction. (Author/RB)

Research with kindergarten children showed that low imagery words were more difficult to recall than high imagery words. (MKM)

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

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)

Points out that children must master a great deal of information about form classes, written conventions, and word referent relationships in order to understand what teachers mean when they use the term "word." (FL)

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

Reports a study of fourteen word lists and proposes a basic list of 240 starter words. (TO)

Studies word learning in predictable text by investigating three important factors in facilitating young children's word learning: the reader, the text, and the task. Offers specific suggestions for teaching. (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)