Instruction in regular letter-sound relationships is a key element of teaching children to read. However, in the English language, many words have irregular spellings (e.g. said, are, yacht). What is the best way to help children learn to read these words? To date, a number of different viewpoints have been put forward, but these viewpoints are seldom directly compared, and there is very little empirical evidence to adjudicate between them. Therefore, in this review, we outline the theoretical arguments for and against different methods of instruction, and synthesise the empirical research that does exist. We make recommendations for practice, and outline key areas where further evidence is required.

Children learning to read in English must learn to read words with varying degrees of grapheme-phoneme correspondence regularity, but there is very little research comparing methods of instruction for words with less predictable or irregular spellings. Therefore, we compared three methods of instruction for beginning readers. MethodEighty-five Kindergarten children were randomly assigned to either Look and Say (LSay), Look and Spell (LSpell), mispronunciation correction (MPC), or wait-list control conditions. Children were taught 12 irregular words over three sessions. Amount of instructional time and number of exposures to the written and spoken forms of the words was controlled across the three experimental conditions. After training, children were assessed on reading aloud and orthographic choice measures. ResultsChildren showed evidence of superior learning of trained words in the LSpell and MPC conditions, compared to LSay and control conditions. Differences between the LSpell and MPC conditions were not significant. There was no evidence of generalization to untrained items. ConclusionsFindings indicate that active processing of a word's orthography is crucial for learning irregular words. These results have implications for initial reading instruction.Further research is required to determine whether differences between LSpell and MPC conditions emerge after longer periods of training.

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In this study, we examined the effect of previewing unfamiliar vocabulary on the real‐time reading behavior of first language (L1) and second language (L2) readers. University students with English as their L1 or L2 read passages with embedded pseudowords. In a within‐participant manipulation, definitions of the pseudowords were either previewed before reading or reviewed after reading. Previewing significantly affected reading behavior on early and late eye‐movement measures, and the patterns of change on the first three contextual encounters with the pseudowords differed for L1 and L2 readers. On the multiple‐choice cloze posttest, encountering novel words in reading followed by definitions resulted in somewhat more accurate responses for L1 but not L2 participants. The learning condition did not affect the results of the meaning recall posttest. These findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between vocabulary support approaches and the reading behavior of L1 and L2 readers when they encounter unfamiliar words in texts.