Relative effects of various word synthesis strategies on the phonics achievement of learning disabled youngsters.

Abstract

This study examined the relative effectiveness of various word attack strategies for a reading disabled population. Over a 2-day period, children were given lessons that provided direct instruction on a medial vowel sound, practice on monosyllabic words containing the sound, and specific transfer training on nonsense syllables. Word attack strategy was varied for the five treatment groups. Practice consisted of synthesis using initial bigrams and final consonants (co-g), initial consonants and final bigrams (c-og), a combination of initial and final bigram training, or letter-by-letter analysis and synthesis (c-o-g). The initial bigram strategy yielded significantly better performance on transfer words. This finding calls into question popular approaches that emphasize rhyming patterns or letter-by-letter decoding.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Phonics (But Were Afraid to Ask)

“…Haskell, Foorman, and Swank (1992) and Sullivan, Okada, and Niedermeyer (1971) found that an analogy approach and a synthetic approach performed equally well, and both were more effective than whole-word approaches. Fayne and Bryant (1981) found that a rime-based strategy was not as effective as teaching children initial bigrams (e.g., co-g). These were short-term studies.…”

“…Good reading instruction contains a balance of activities around these different goals. For enjoyment, children should be able to choose at least some of the books that they read (Morrow & Tracey, 1998;Turner, 1995) and should be read aloud to from a variety of books from different genres (Feitelson, Kita, & Goldstein, 1986). For comprehension, children should engage in discussions and questioning about the content of what they read.…”

Rethinking Secondary School Programs for Students with Learning Disabilities

“…Each year, students probably will need an intensive phonics review emphasizing word parts and word families, not individual sound-symbol associations (see Bradley & Bryant, 1985;Fayne & Bryant, 1981;Williams, 1980;Graham & Johnson, 1989). Decoding strategies such as those empha-sized in the Glass analysis techniques also should be reviewed (Glass, 1978).…”

Teaching Reading to Learning Disabled Students: A Review of Research-Supported Procedures

“…Instruction that involved arranging pictures of words according to their shared sound characteristics (beginning, middle, or ending sounds) plus forming words using plastic letters was particularly effective. Fayne and Bryant ( 1981) reported that direct instruction on a decoding strategy that emphasized clustering and blending the first two letters (CV) with the final letter (C) was more effective than several other alternative strategies, including letter-byletter decoding. Henderson and Shores (1982) noted that training LD students to attend to suffixes while reading orally resulted in improved comprehension and reading fluency.…”