Manipulative objects have long been an essential tool in the development of mathematics knowledge and skills. A growing body of evidence suggests using manipulative letters for decoding practice is an also an effective method for teaching reading, particularly in improving the phonological and decoding skills of students at risk for reading…

The reading achievement of students with learning disabilities (N=24) who received DISTAR instruction was compared to that of similar students using basal reader materials. The overall reading scores were not significantly different following one and two years of instruction, although DISTAR students had somewhat better word attack skills. (DB)

Identifies subgroups of children with reading disabilities using the regression method--children who were poor in phonological, compared to orthographic, word decoding were identified as phonological-type participants, and children who were poor in orthographic, compared to phonological, decoding were identified as surface-type participants.…

This digest provides basic information on phonological awareness in the process of learning to read for students with learning disabilities. It considers how phonological awareness fits into this process and the special problems experienced by children with learning disabilities or from culturally diverse backgrounds. Suggestions for teaching…

This article describes the Reading Strategies Program, which teaches decoding skills to primary-level students with learning disabilities with a methodology intended to teach children to apply the skills to literature. Cognitive strategies also are used to apply comprehension skills to the material and to write about the material read. (JDD)

Blending and spelling training were compared to determine which intervention would improve the decoding skills of two first-grade boys with learning disabilities. Although neither intervention proved superior, the children met the learning criterion with both interventions and demonstrated both maintenance and generalization of their skills. (DB)

The evidence presented in this paper suggests that deficits in selective skills are primary factors in learning disabilities, and that aptitude/treatment interaction models may be useful in devising teaching methods for the reading instruction of learning disabled children. After reviewing various approaches to teaching reading to learning…

This investigation describes a field test of the materials entitled "Reading: An Educational Approach to Disability" (READ), which were developed to aid disabled readers in the beginning stages of learning to decode English print. The subjects were 15 Title I reading teachers working in small groups with 183 second-grade children. The…

A study was conducted to address the need for the public school system to provide an enriched curriculum for classroom teachers with "at-risk" students. It also examined whether students who had been exposed to a variety of supporting and related techniques of letter recognition through systematic instruction would be able to…

An instructional program that teaches decoding skills to learning disabled children was developed to serve as a supplement to whatever reading program is used in the classroom. As a result of task analysis, the program's instructional sequence begins with auditory tasks analyzing syllables and short words into phonemes, then blending these…

Forty children (ages five to nine) with or without reading disabilities, matched for mental age or reading age, completed a phoneme-grapheme learning task. Reading-disabled children took more trials than controls to learn correspondence pairs. Performance on the phonological processing task of short-term memory was the best predictor of overall…

A follow-up at the end of first grade examined effects of teaching five kindergarten teachers in general and special education classes to stimulate phonological manipulation skills such as blending and segmenting. For children with learning disabilities and mild mental retardation (but not for nondisabled children) the treatment continued to show…

Twenty-three first-graders at risk for learning disabilities received one-to-one tutoring from noncertified tutors for 30 minutes, 4 days a week, for one school year. Tutoring included instruction in phonological skills, explicit decoding, writing, spelling, and reading phonically controlled text. Participants significantly outperformed controls…

This executive summary discusses our current understanding of the difficulties that children with reading/learning disabilities encounter as they start down the road to reading and summarizes research on early identification and intervention. The focus is on children in kindergarten through second grade. Findings from the analysis indicate: (1)…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a four-step phonological awareness strategy on the reading skills of nine third-grade students with learning disabilities or educable mental retardation. Results indicated students made substantial improvement on measures of blending and segmenting sounds, pronouncing words, auditory discrimination, and…