Fostering the Development of Reading Skill Through Supplemental Instruction

Abstract

This paper reports the effects of a two-year supplemental reading program for kindergarten through third grade students that focused on the development of decoding skills and reading fluency. Two hundred ninety-nine students were identified for participation and were randomly assigned to the supplemental instruction or to a no-treatment control group. Participants' reading ability was assessed in the fall, before the first year of the intervention, and again in the spring of years 1, 2, 3, and 4. At the end of the two-year intervention, students who received the supplemental instruction performed significantly better than their matched controls on measures of entry level reading skills (i.e., letterword identification and word attack), oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The benefits of the instruction were still clear two years after instruction had ended with students in the supplemental-instruction condition still showing significantly greater growth on the measure of oral reading fluency. Hispanic students benefited from the supplemental reading instruction in English as much as or more than non-Hispanic students. Results support the value of supplemental instruction focused on the development of word recognition skills for helping students at risk for reading failure. Fostering the Development of Reading Skill through Supplemental Instruction: Results for Hispanic and Non-Hispanic StudentsThe long-term impact of reading failure on school success is well established (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998;Juel, 1988;Slavin et al., 1996). So, too, is the relation between learning to read in the primary grades and the development of reading ability throughout elementary school (Francis, Shaywitz, Steubing, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1996;Juel, 1988). Reading acquisition is frequently viewed as a "bottom-up" process, based on the development of word recognition skills to promote fluency and comprehension (Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pestsky, & Seidenberg, 2001). Within this framework, fluent word recognition allows the reader to allocate increased attention to key comprehension processes, such as making meaningful connections between sentences within a passage or relating text meaning to prior experiences and information (Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp, & Jenkins, 2001). Thus, learning how to decode text provides a requisite foundation not only for reading fluency but also for higher-level comprehension processes.Evidence from 20 years of reading research points to the development of fluent word recognition skills as the biggest difficulty that students face in learning to read (Share & Stanovich, 1995). In particular, theories of word recognition (Ehri, 1998; Please send correspondence concerning this article to: Barbara Gunn, Ph.D., Oregon Research Institute, 1715 Franklin Blvd., Eugene, OR 97403-1983, Telephone: 541.484.2123/fax: 541.484.1108. E-mail: barbarag@ori.org. Grant #DA 09678 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse supported the preparation of this manuscript. The authors thank Christine Cody and ...

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