Many students struggle to acquire adequate reading comprehension and writing skills. Although word recognition and spelling are needed to fully actualize these skills, the oral language aspects of reading and writing can be taught and practiced without text. Oral storytelling is good for all students, but it may be essential for students with…

Effective approaches to fluency instruction should facilitate automatic and accurate word recognition as well as the ability to read with expression. The study reported in this article focused on instructional approaches that can be used with small groups of learners within a broader literacy curriculum, one that is suitable for flexible grouping.…

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)

A hallmark of skilled reading is recognizing written words automatically from memory by sight. How beginning readers attain this skill is explained. They must acquire foundational knowledge, including phonemic segmentation, grapheme-phoneme knowledge, decoding, and spelling skills. When these skills are applied, spellings of words become bonded to…

Drawing on research-informed principles for primary-grade vocabulary instruction, the authors developed a series of engaging vocabulary units for a first-grade class. The units, focused on the explicit teaching of target words and the efficient highlighting of larger sets of semantically related words, involved five complementary elements: reading…

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

Gives specific ideas for encouraging students to be flexible in their approach to decoding words. (MKM)

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)

Research suggests that parent involvement improves academic achievement, but in the busy world in which we live it is often difficult to promote. Many researchers suggest that successful programs value parents' limited time constraints, diversity of literacy skills, and availability of materials. The Great Poetry Race provides an easy vehicle to…

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)

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

A deep, developmental construct and definition of fluency, in which fluency and reading comprehension have a reciprocal relationship, is explicated and contrasted with superficial approaches to that construct. The historical development of fluency is outlined, along with conclusions of the U.S. National Reading Panel, to explore why fluency has…

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