The purpose of this review is to synthesize the existing research on decodability as a text characteristic examining how reading decodable text impacts students' reading performance and growth. The results are organized into two sections based on the research designs of the studies: (1) studies that described student performance when reading texts…

Identifies several reasons why children do not enjoy reading, including rote learning, unjustified reduction in number of words contained in primers, patronizing of the reader, unnatural sentence structure, and teacher dominance. Describes a Swiss reading program as an example of a better alternative to American primers. (DC)

Teaching students how to read is one of the most important tasks in elementary schools. The majority of schools use published basal programs to teach students to read. Several published reviews have indicated that past editions of basal readers did not align with appropriate instruction for beginning level readers. In this study I reviewed five of…

Paul Hanna (1966), in his classic spelling study, developed frequency tables that described the relative frequency of the letters (graphemes) used to represent the major English sounds (phonemes). By restructuring the Hanna tables, a set of tables may be developed for estimating levels of reading difficulty based upon the relative frequency of the…