Kathrina T.

Cabador

National Reading Panel

PROBLEM SOLUTION

-Phonetic Awareness
 PA training is not effective for improving
disabled readers’ spelling skills, perhaps  As evident, language now impacted
because their spelling skills are much spelling effect sizes, with English-speaking
harder to remediate than their reading students benefiting more from PA training
skills. than non-English-speaking students. Also,
letter use now impacted phonemic
awareness effect sizes such that children
 The absence of effects on spelling is that who manipulated letters acquired more PA
most of the studies involving disabled than children who did not. Removal of
readers were in the pool of English disabled readers rendered findings for
studies. This may have suppressed the these moderators consistent across all
English effect size in spelling. three outcomes. That is, language exerted
the same impact on PA, reading, and
spelling outcomes, with English producing
larger effects than non-English. Also letter
use exerted the same impact on PA,
reading and spelling, with letter
manipulation producing larger effects than
no letters.
In sum, these findings support the
following conclusions. PA training does not
improve spelling in disabled readers, but it
does improve spelling in normally
developing readers below 2nd grade and
children at risk for future reading
problems. Among nondisabled readers,
the benefit to spelling is positive and does
not depend on whether one or two or
multiple PA skills are taught, whether
instruction is delivered to individuals or to
 small groups, how long training lasts, or
whether teachers or researchers are the
trainers. However, the benefit to spelling
among nondisabled readers does depend
upon the language, with PA training in
English exerting a bigger impact on
spelling than PA training in other
languages.
NRP,p2-25 to 26

 PA training was found to be very effective

in teaching phonemic awareness to
students. PA training succeeded in
teaching children various ways to
manipulate phonemes, including
segmentation, blending, and deletion. PA
training was effective in teaching PA skills
across all levels of the moderator variables
examined.
PA training improved children’s ability to
read and spell in both the short and the
long term.
NRP,p2-28

-It is important to note that acquiring

phonemic awareness is a means rather
than an end. PA is not acquired for its own
sake but rather for its value in helping
children understand and use the
alphabetic system to read and write. This
is why including letters in the process of
teaching children to manipulate phonemes
is important. PA training with letters helps
learners determine how phonemes match
up to graphemes within words and thus
facilitates transfer to reading and spelling.
NRP,p2-33
 -Comparison of phonemic awareness
following training showed that the treated
groups performed equally well and both
outperformed controls, indicating that
both types of training were equally
effective in teaching PA. To measure
transfer to reading, a simplified word
learning task was devised. After children
learned to associate four letters and
sounds, they were given practice learning
to read five words composed of the letters
and sounds: am, at, mat, sat, sam. Each
word was taught by saying, “This is
aaaaat, at.” Results revealed that only the
focused group learned to read the words
in fewer trials than the control group, not
the comprehensive group.
NRP,p2-38
-Phonics  There are various delivery systems that
 Children who are unexpectedly poor might be used to teach phonics. Tutoring
readers because their intelligence (an one-on-one is regarded as the ideal form
index of learning aptitude for some of instruction for students who are having
academic skills) is higher than their difficulties because it allows teachers to
reading ability, and children whose below- tailor lessons to address individual
average reading is not surprising given students’ needs. One of the best known
that their intelligence is also below tutoring programs is Reading Recovery©
average. Various labels such as dyslexic or (Clay, 1993). The database included three
learning disabled or reading disabled have studies that modified Reading Recovery©
been applied to children whose higher IQs lessons to include systematic phonics
are discrepant with their poor reading instruction (Greaney et al., 1997; Santa &
skill. Children whose lower reading scores Hoien, 1999; Tunmer & Hoover, 1993).
are consistent with their lower IQs have The remainder of the studies utilized small
been referred to as low achievers or groups or whole classes to deliver
garden variety poor readers (Stanovich, instruction. Of interest was whether one
1986). The question of interest was type of delivery system produced greater
whether phonics instruction helps to gains in reading than the other types. In
remediate reading difficulties for both the Panel’s analysis of phonemic
types of poor readers. awareness training effects, comparison of
 instructional units revealed that small
groups produced superior learning.
However, it was expected that tutoring
would be the most effective way to teach
phonics.
NRP,p2-106
 When Phonics taught in kindergarten or 1st
grade to readers who have little reading
ability, it produces a larger effect than  The most important grade for teaching
when phonics is introduces in grades phonics is thought to be 1st grade when
above 1st grade with readers who have formal instruction in reading typically
already acquired some reading skills. begins in the United States. Children have
However, in older children it is truly less foundational knowledge and are ready to
effective this reading problems may be put it to use in learning to read and write.
especially difficult to those involved in the In contrast, introducing phonics instruction
older group in low achieving readers. in grades above 1st means that children
who were taught to read in some other
way may be required to switch gears in
order to incorporate phonics procedures
into their reading and writing. The
database included studies that introduced
phonics to students at various grade
levels.
NRP,p2-105

-Text reading is easiest when readers

have learned to read most of the words in
the text automatically by sight because
little attention or effort is required to
process the words. When written words
are unfamiliar, readers may decode them
or read them by analogy or predict the
words, but these steps take added time
and shift attention at least momentarily
from the meaning of text to figuring out
the words.
-Readers need to learn how to read words
in the various ways to develop reading
 skill. The primary way to build a sight
vocabulary is to apply decoding or
analogizing strategies to read unfamiliar
words. These ways of reading words help
the words to become familiar. Processing
letter-sound relations in the words through
decoding or analogizing creates alphabetic
connections that establish the words in
memory as sight words (Ehri, 1992;
Share, 1995).
NRP,p2-107

-In sum, these findings show that

systematic phonics instruction helped
beginning readers acquire and use the
alphabetic system to read and spell words
in and out of text. Children who were
taught phonics systematically benefited
significantly more than beginners who did
not receive phonics instruction in their
ability to decode regularly spelled words
and nonwords, in their ability to remember
how to read irregularly spelled words, and
in their ability to invent phonetically
plausible spellings of words. In addition,
phonics instruction contributed
substantially to students’ growth in
reading comprehension and somewhat
less to their oral text reading skill.
NRP,p2-116
-Fluency
 The National Assessment of Educational  To understand how efficient word
Progress conducted a large study of the recognition skills can influence other
status of fluency achievement in American reading processes such as comprehension,
education, it states that the students to be word recognition must be fractionated into
disfluent in grade-level stories that its component elements such as accuracy
students had read under supportive of word recognition and the automaticity
testing conditions. Students who are in of word recognition. In the early stage of
 low fluency may have difficulty getting the reading instruction, the beginning reader
meaning of what they read. may be accurate in word recognition but
the process is likely to be slow and
effortful. With increased practice and
repeated exposure to the words in the
texts that the student reads, word
 In reading accuracy, speed, and recognition continues to be accurate but
expression interfere with comprehension there would be improvements evident in
the speed and ease of word recognition as
 One factors that has been done that those well.
superior readers they have been a solid The reading task for the fluent reader is
experimental input as time spent reading easier than the one facing the nonfluent
or the amount to read to improve their reader. After considerable practice, the
fluency, however, those 1st grade children fluent reader has learned how to
with good word recognition skills were recognize the printed words with ease and
exposed to about twice as many words in speed, and few cognitive resources are
basal text as children with poor word consumed in the process. In essence, the
recognition skills, similar differences in reader has become automatic at the word
print exposure among readers with recognition task. Because the cognitive
different levels of reading ability demands for word recognition are so small
while the word recognition process is
occurring, there are sufficient cognitive
resources available for grouping the words
into syntactic units and for understanding
or interpreting the text. The fluent reader
is one who can perform multiple tasks—
such as word recognition and
comprehension—at the same time. The
nonfluent reader, on the other hand, can
perform only one task at a time. The
“multitask functioning” of the fluent reader
is made possible by the reduced cognitive
demands needed for word recognition and
other reading processes, thus freeing
cognitive resources for other functions,
such as drawing inferences.
NRP,p.3-8-9
 There is ample evidence that one of the
major differences between poor and good
readers is the difference in the quantity of
total time they spend reading. Allington
(1977) in his article “If they don’t read
much, how they ever gonna get good?”
found that the students who needed the
most practice in reading spent the least
amount of time in actual reading. Biemiller
(1977-1978) similarly reported substantial
ability group differences related to how
much reading was done, and Allington
(1984) in a sample of first grade students
found that as little as 16 words were read
in a week by one child in a low-reading
group compared to a high of 1,933 words
for a child in a highreading group. Nagy
and Anderson (1984) claimed that good
readers may read ten times as many
words as the poor readers in a given
school year. Stanovich (1986), in his
article “Matthew effects in reading,”
suggested that students who start out as
poor readers often remain that way. In the
Bible chapter on Matthew (Matthew,
25:29), there is the phrase “The rich get
richer and the poor get poorer.” Stanovich
applied this Biblical phrase as a metaphor
to reading, claiming poor readers read less
than good readers, and he speculated that
because of this difference, year after year
the gap between the two groups
increases. More recent empirical evidence
indicates that while poor readers remain
poor readers, the gap between the two
groups does not increase (Shaywitz et al.,
1995).
NRP, p.3-10