Learning to read words: Linguistic units and instructional strategies. Juel, C., & Minden-Cupp

I've started plowing through this VERY long article. 

In the opening, the researchers start by discussing various theories of teaching phonics, infering specialists are not sure HOW to go about teaching phonics.  Everyone does at least seem to agree it should be taught.

One problem mentioned by Juel and Minden-Cupp is that there are so many variables  it is difficult to say exactly which instructional format is best for each child.  They listed four basic strategies: 1. traditional phonics approach; 2. identifying unknown words with analogy to known words; 3. emphasize meaning level of the text; and 4. self-teaching hypothesis.

For the exeriment they used 4 first grade classrooms somewhere in the SE United States.  Two schools were close, all were 70% free/reduced, 60% Black, 36% White, and 4 % other ethnic groups.  All four teachers were white females with no more than 10 years experience (at least 5 of which were at the test school)  The goal was to follow the teachers through a school years, making observations in Language Arts classes of 1 hour per week. Each classroom had 3 reading groups: low, middle, and high. At the end of the year, all the data collected was compaired and conclusions drawn.

The article is very detailed and tells exactly how the data was collected, what they were collecting, and how each teacher taught their groups. 

The results are summarized, and one finding that stood out was that lower levels students who enter with few skills proceed best with intensive instruction in sounds and blending.  Only one class used intensive instruction in these areas, and they scored the highest.  The lowest class used memorization of patterns with no emphasis on sounds and blending.  The teacher must provide LOTS of instruction in phonemes and blends; peer tutoring is not enough with delayed students.

The researchers freely admit this is a limited study and more investigation is needed.  (I really appreciated their openness in that respect)However, the results do require a thoughtful evaluation.  As students are progress monitored, we must be willing to change our approach if the results are not headed to the approapriate end-of-year goals.  These teachers "stayed the course" in the lower achieving rooms, even when it was very obvious the results were less than stellar.