Although connectionist models provide a framework explaining how the decoding and encoding abilities work reciprocally to enhance reading and spelling ability, encoding instruction in today's schools is not a priority. Although a limited amount of high-quality experimental or control studies to date (N = 11) give empirical support to using direct, explicit encoding instruction to increase the reading and spelling abilities of those students at risk for literacy failure, the benefits of integrating this instruction into current reading curriculums warrant further consideration. Students receiving encoding instruction and guided practice that included using (a) manipulatives (e.g., letter tiles, plastic letters) to learn phoneme-grapheme relationships and words and (b) writing phoneme-grapheme relationships and words made from these correspondences significantly outperformed contrast groups not receiving encoding instruction. Robust Cohen's d effect sizes, favoring the treatment groups, were found in areas of phonemic awareness, spelling, decoding, fluency, comprehension, and writing. Educational implications of these findings suggest that there is support for using encoding instruction to increase the literacy performances of at-risk primary grade students and that encoding instruction can be successful in improving the reading and spelling performances of older students with learning disabilities. Importantly, there is also evidence to support the transfer effects of early encoding instruction on later reading, writing, and spelling performances.

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Teacher knowledge and instructional expertise have been found in correlational and pre- and posttest studies to be related to student reading achievement. This article summarizes data presented in this special issue and additional research to address four questions: (a) What do expert reading teachers know? (b) Why do teachers need to acquire this knowledge? (c) Do teachers believe they have this knowledge? and (d) Are teachers being adequately prepared to teach reading? Well-designed studies relevant to this topic have been sparse with a noticeable lack of attention given to identifying specific causal links between teacher knowledge, teaching expertise, and student reading achievement. Until the appropriate research designs and methodologies are applied to address the question of causal effects, conclusions about the specific content that teachers must know and the instructional practices that are most beneficial in presenting this content are preliminary at best. Future studies of the effect of essential reading content knowledge must be extended beyond word-level skills to vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing.

Approximately, 80% to 85% of students with learning disabilities (LD) have been described as having reading disabilities (Shaywitz, Morris, & Shaywitz, 2008). Intervention studies designed to prevent reading disabilities have accumulated over recent years because of the increased ability for researchers to predict those students who will develop these disabilities (e.g., Mathes et al., 2005). Typically, explicit and systematic intervention is given to those students either randomly or quasi selected who score below the 25th percentile on screeners in areas of phonological processing skills, letter name/sounds knowledge, vocabulary, decoding, and spelling abilities. These early intervention studies may help determine if at-risk students are just a result of poor prereading skills and/or low economic or minority status and those who may truly be developing reading disabilities (Fletcher, Lyon, Fuchs, & Barnes, 2007; Fletcher & Vaughn, 2009), and thus, may reduce the amount of students requiring special education services (Scanlon, Vellutino, Small, Fanuele, & Sweeney, 2005). Reading performance has been demonstrated to be highly related to spelling ability, with correlations ranging from .68 to .93 (Foorman et al., 2006; Morris, Bloodgood, & Perney, 2003). One reason for this relationship is reading and spelling's shared role of phonological and orthographical processing ability (Adams, 1990; Ehri, 1997). Spelling requires the capacity to process language, segment phonemes (i.e., breaking words into individual sounds), and match each phoneme to its respective letter or letters (i.e., graphemes). Likewise, reading requires the ability to process language by matching grapheme-phoneme pairs into individual parts of speech to pronounce words. The process of decoding (i.e., reading words) requires the processing of written symbols into speech, whereas the practice of encoding (i.e., spelling or the ability to build words) involves transposing speech into writing (Moats, 2010; Weiser & Mathes, 2011). Decoding tasks, for purposes of this study, include independent, partner, small group, and whole class activities of orally or silently reading letters, blending and reading single words and isolated pseudowords (i.e., decodable, nonsense words), lists of words and pseudowords, and connected text (i.e., reading real words in phrases, sentences, paragraphs, stories, and books). Encoding instruction, for purposes of this study, includes learning to add prefixes and suffixes, spelling rules, word patterns, and syllable types, and how to distinguish between 450017L DQ36310.