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)

According to this study using both physiological and word recognition error criteria to ascertain students' reading frustration level, repetitions should be counted as errors to obtain authentic reading level scores on informal reading inventories. (TO)

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…

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.…

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.…

In a quasi-experimental study, kindergarten teachers taught children mnemonic stories to orient the confusable letters "b" and "d." In the first week's stories, intervention teachers introduced the left-to-right sequence of features for these letters with "the bat hits the ball" and "a dime rolls up to a…

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…

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…

Suggests that perceptual problems may account for the difficulty young children experience in recognizing words. (RB)