Twenty-four beginning readers participated in a study of the effectiveness of cued learning. The study was carried out in two phases--a letter-learning phase and a word-learning phase. The children were taught one at a time by the same teacher over a four-year period. During the word-learning phase, one fourth of the children used a vowels-only color code, one fourth used auditory-to-visual (AV) spelling cues, one fourth used both, and one fourth used neither. Results indicated that the groups using color coding made significantly fewer errors when reading colored vowel combination and nonphonetic words (but not short vowel words) and also when transferring to black nonphonetic words and when decoding words not previously taught. The children using spelling cues made significantly fewer errors when reading black vowel-combination words. Neither the color coding nor the spelling cues impeded transfer to uncued words. First encounter spelling errors were significantly more numerous than reading errors in words previously taught and significantly less numerous than first encounter reading errors. (Appendixes contain lesson plans and vowel games, and lists of colors, keywords, and pictures used in the study.) (FL)