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…

The authors report findings from an evaluation of the reading competence of students in selected elementary schools in Trinidad and Tobago. The work was conducted in eight schools and involved the testing of 450 students in standards (grades) 1 and 5 for competence in comprehension, oral reading, and word recognition. Methods and results relating…

According to interpretations of results from the latest oral reading fluency (ORF) study conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (White et al., 2020), fourth-grade students who score below the basic standard require interventions that focus on word recognition, phonological decoding, and fluency. Before such mandates for…

The purpose of this article is to describe a strategy called the Poetry Academy used to boost reading skills in elementary school students. The Poetry Academy paired struggling readers with a community volunteer to read poetry on a weekly schedule to practice fluency, work on word recognition abilities, and build confidence. A research study took…

Two struggling fourth-grade readers with learning disabilities who have severe deficits in word recognition, comprehension, and reading fluency improve their reading skills using a method that combines intensive word study with the timed repeated reading of poetry. The direct instruction included semantics, morphology, orthography, and…

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…

Reviews the literature on phonic generalizations and presents a formula measuring the usefulness of word recognition, concluding that further research is needed. (RB)

This study, using the Visual Pattern Recognition Test for Prereading Skills, found that beginning readers improve in word recognition if they are given training in identifying essential components of letters. (HOD)

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)

Finds evidence for a relationship between children's ability to use word recognition generalizations and their reading achievement, although they may not need to be able to verbalize those generalizations. (Author/FL)

Analyzes research reports that describe specific corrective feedback techniques. Notes effects for comprehension and for accuracy of word recognition among remedial and average readers and discusses instructional implications of the findings. (FL)

Reports on a study testing the validity of the Names Test, an individually administered phonics assessment. Provides support for the Names Test's validity by showing it to be significantly correlated with established tests of word recognition and decoding ability. (SR)

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)

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…