What is Developmentally Appropriate?
Treatment intervention research has shown that appropriate early direct instruction seems to be the best medicine for reading problems. Reading is not developmental or natural, but is learned. Reading difficulties reflect a persistent deficit, rather than a developmental lag in linguistic (phonological) skills and basic reading skills. Children who fall behind at an early age (K and grade 1) fall further and further behind over time. Longitudinal studies show that of the children who are diagnosed as reading disabled in third grade, 74% remain disabled in ninth grade. Adults with reading problems exhibit the same characteristics that are exhibited by children with reading problems.

These findings contradict the prevalent notion that children will begin to learn to read when they are "ready." The concept "developmentally appropriate" should not suggest delaying intervention, but using appropriate instructional strategies at an early age - especially in kindergarten. Although we now have the ability to identify children who are at-risk for reading failure, and we now understand some of the instructional conditions that must be considered for teaching, the majority of reading disabilities are not identified until the third grade.

Lack of phonemic awareness seems to be a major obstacle to learning to read. This is true for any language, even Chinese. About two in five children have some level of difficulty with phonemic awareness. For about one in five children phonemic awareness does not develop or improve over time. These children never catch up, but fall further and further behind in reading and in all academic subjects.

Instruction using the following types of phonemic awareness tasks has had a positive effect on reading acquisition and spelling for pre-readers: rhyming, auditorily discriminating sounds that are different, blending spoken sounds into words, word-to-word matching, isolating sounds in words, counting phonemes, segmenting spoken words into sounds, deleting sounds from words.

Explicit instruction in how segmentation and blending are involved in the reading process was superior to instruction that did not explicitly teach the children to apply phonemic awareness to reading . Kindergarten children with explicit instruction in phonemic awareness did better than a group of first graders who had no instruction, indicating that this crucial pre-skill for reading can be taught at least by age five and is not developmental.

In a study, seven weeks of explicit instruction in phonemic awareness combined with explicit instruction in sound-spelling correspondences for kindergarten children was more powerful than instruction in sound-spelling correspondences alone and more powerful than language activities in improving reading skills.

In a study, 260 children were randomly assigned to a revised kindergarten curriculum (n=80) and a standard curriculum (n=160) consisting of developmentally appropriate practices described by the state of Texas' essential elements for kindergarten. The revised curriculum sought to prevent reading disabilities by teaching phonemic awareness for 15 minutes a day using the Lundberg, Frost, and Petersen (1988) curriculum from Sweden and Denmark. Children in the revised curriculum made significant gains in phonemic awareness over the year. Foorman et al. found that the greatest gains occurred when the explicit instruction moved into teaching the sound-spelling relationships concurrently with the instruction in phonemic awareness.

Instruction in specific sound-spelling relationships was more effective than teaching students a strategy for using analogous word parts on transfer to new words and on standardized reading measures (Lovett, Borden, DeLuca, Lacerenza, Benson, & Brackstone, 1994). Torgesen et al. (in press) also found that explicitly teaching the sound-spelling relationships was superior to teaching word families and word analogies and superior to an implicit approach.

Researchers found that explicit, systematic instruction in sound-spelling relationships in the classroom was more effective in reducing reading disabilities than a print-rich environment characterized by interesting stories, even with children who had benefited from phonemic awareness instruction in kindergarten.

"...Children scoring below the 25th percentile are often identified as reading disabled under traditional diagnostic criteria. These results suggest that [explicit, systematic instruction] in sound-spelling patterns in first and second grade classrooms can prevent reading difficulties in a population of children at-risk of reading failure."

The whole language treatment offered children a print-rich environment with interesting stories. The embedded phonics treatment included a more structured approach to phonics in a print-rich environment. The systematic, explicit phonic approach included phonemic awareness instruction, explicit instruction in sound-spelling relationships, and extensive practice in decodable text. Details of the explicit, systematic approach are described in the next section.

Foorman et al. (in press) also found that changing instruction to explicit, systematic phonics at the classroom level was more effective in reducing the occurrence of reading problems than any of the one-on-one tutorial programs that were evaluated. Foorman and her colleagues concluded that in order to avoid reading failure, the focus should be on prevention, not intervention.

"...These curriculum effects have important implications for urban school districts with large numbers of students at risk for reading failure. The morbidity of reading failure and subsequent placement in special education can possibly be reduced with explicit, systematic phonics in the alphabetic code during first grade."

"...It is often incorrectly assumed that predicting upcoming words in sentences is a relatively easy and highly accurate activity. Actually, many different empirical studies have indicated that naturalistic text is not that predictable. Alford (1980) found that for a set of moderately long expository passages of text, subjects needed an average of more than four guesses to correctly anticipate upcoming words in the passage (the method of scoring actually makes this a considerable underestimate). Across a variety of subject populations and texts, a reader's probability of predicting the next word in a passage is usually between .20 and .35. Indeed, as Gough (1983) has shown, the figure is highest for function words, and is often quite low for the very words in the passage that carry the most information content." (p. 90)

Stanovich and Stanovich (1995) also summarise the findings regarding the role of context in reading acquisition. Of the three cueing systems frequently mentioned in reading (semantic, syntactic, and graphophonemic cues), the semantic and syntactic cueing systems seem to play a minor role. Recent eye movement research indicates that good readers do not sample the text and predict to recognise words efficiently, but rather see every single letter on the page.

"...the word recognition skills of the good reader are so rapid, automatic, and efficient that the skilled reader need not rely on contextual information. In fact, it is poor readers who guess from context--out of necessity because their decoding skills are so weak."

In the NICHD interventions studies (Foorman, et al., in press; Torgesen et al., in press) teaching children to use context and prediction as strategies for word recognition resulted in greater numbers of reading disabilities than instruction that taught children to use their sound-spelling knowledge as the primary strategy for word recognition.