This study was designed to examine the effects of an intervention program aimed at improving reading, spelling, and vocabulary skills through linguistically explicit instruction in morphological awareness. Sixteen children, diagnosed with language impairment, participated in this study. Instruction for the experimental group focused on increasing their knowledge of the morphological structure of words and teaching them to apply this information to reading, spelling, and vocabulary tasks. The control group was exposed to the same treatment stimuli, but no attention was given to the semantic or orthographic changes associated with the use of the affixes. Participants in the experimental group made significantly greater gains in both spelling and vocabulary skills than did the control group with large effect sizes noted on the experimental measures. The participants also demonstrated the ability to generalize this information to untaught words as well. The results suggest that linguistically explicit instruction in morphological awareness is beneficial for improving the literacy and language skills of children with language impairment.

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the validity of a nonsense-word-pairs paradigm as an implicit phonological awareness task. For this task one member of each nonsense-word-pair violated the rules of consonant combination in English (e.g., /integral kib/), and the other did not (e.g., /integral rib/). The subjects were required to choose the member of the pair that contained permissible consonant sequence(s). Eighty-one normally developing first- and second-graders were given the implicit phonological awareness task, 3 explicit phonological awareness tasks, 2 reading tasks, and a multisyllabic word production task. There were significant correlations between the implicit phonological awareness task and all of the experimental tasks, with the exception of one. Additionally, the implicit phonological awareness task was sensitive to developmental differences between the first- and second-grade readers.

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As speech-language pathologists work more directly and in concert with educators to address reading problems in school-age children with language-based learning disabilities (LLD), knowledge of current methods in reading instruction will become critical. Eight methods found to be effective with typically developing children and children with LLD are outlined. Word identification is best trained using methods that rely upon knowledge of letter-sound correspondences in varying syllable contexts and word attack skills using letter-sound decoding and analogy. When learning reading comprehension, students benefit from methods that address vocabulary skills and text-level comprehension monitoring.On a daily basis, the U.S. public is bombarded with news reports regarding new government initiatives-local, state, and federal-for addressing the seemingly intractable reading problems faced by children and our education system. Over the past 25 years, the amount of involvement of speechlanguage pathologists (SLPs) in reading interventions has increased as the relationship between reading impairment and school-age language impairment has become more clear. Given the connection between language disorders and reading disabilities, the American Speech-Language-Hearing As-