http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/cunningham.htm

Dr. Anne Cunningham, is the Director of the Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education with the Graduate School of Education at Berkeley and the Historian of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.  She is the co-author of “What Reading Does For The Mind” and numerous other articles and research papers related to reading.

The following interview with Dr. Anne Cunningham was conducted at the studios of KCSM (PBS) Television in San Mateo California on September 5, 2003.  Dr. Cunningham elegantly balances public school reading teaching experience with rigorous scientific research work and university level teacher training. She is dedicated to making a difference in the lives of children by helping them learn to read more effectively.

By Catherine Pagan

Brandon is on target to become a reader. But if he’d been in school seven years ago, he might well have been on track for special education instead. That’s because he started kindergarten showing clear signs of reading difficulties. An assessment found that he was having trouble with such tasks as identifying letters and recognizing or reproducing the initial sounds in spoken words. Most telling, he was making little or no progress after a few weeks in school. The school’s old approach wasn’t geared to dealing with reading problems quickly and systematically. A learning disability label and a referral to special education might have been the outcome for this bright
boy.

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/fall04/prevention.htm

by Andrew Biemiller

In recent years, we have seen a tremendous emphasis on the importance of phonics instruction to ensure educational progress. We also have seen that while more children learn to “read” with increased phonics instruction, there have not been commensurate gains in reading comprehension (e.g., Gregory, Earl, and O’Donoghue, 1993; Madden et al., 1993; Pinnell et al., 1994). What is missing for many children who master phonics but don’t comprehend well is vocabulary, the words they need to know in order to understand what they’re reading. Thus vocabulary is the “missing link” in reading/language instruction in our school system. Because vocabulary deficits particularly affect less advantaged and second-language children, I will be arguing that such “deficits” are fundamentally more remediable than many other school learning problems.

http://www.wordsmartedu.com/Biemiller_Teaching_Vocab.pdf

http://www.ciera.org/library/archive/1999-02/art-online-99-02.html

By: Juel, Connie and Cecilia Minden-Cupp

Focus groups conducted in preparation for the Center for the Improvement of
Early Reading Achievement (CIERA) grant showed that teachers and
administrators raised more questions about how to teach children to read
words than any other issue in early reading. Word recognition must become
something children can do on their own, because they will quickly be
expected to read words they have never before seen in print. Concluding
remarks offer classroom practices to help children who enter first grade
with minimal reading skill have success.

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2006469.asp

The Nation’s Report Card
Fourth-Grade Students Reading Aloud: NAEP 2002 Special Study of Oral Reading

October 2005

Authors: Mary C. Daane, Jay R. Campbell, Wendy S. Grigg, Madeline J. Goodman, and Andreas Oranje

This new NCES report discusses findings about fourth-grade students’ oral
reading from a special study that was part of the 2002 National Assessment
of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessment. The results suggest
that the three separate components of oral reading ability (accuracy, rate,
and fluency) are very much related to each other and to reading
comprehension, as measured by the main NAEP assessment. “Fluent” readers in
this study were likely to read higher percentages of words accurately, to
read the passage at a faster rate, and to have scored higher, on average,
on the NAEP reading assessment than “nonfluent” readers. More than
one-half of the students read the study passage fluently, with a fairly
high degree of accuracy, and at a rate of at least 105 words per minute.
However, a group of students whose average scale score and labored oral
reading performance suggested they were struggling also demonstrated, on
average, the lowest performance on measures of accuracy, rate, and fluency.

Authors: Lauren Resnick and Chris Zurawsky

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/spring05/resnick.htm

The last 15 years have witnessed a profound sea-change in American
education. Labeled “standards-based education,” the shift has involved
important changes in the basic mode of operation of our schools and has
greatly affected the lives of teachers and other educators. In American
Educator, Spring 2005 issue.

Joseph K. Torgesen

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/fall04/reading.htm

Summary:  In “The American Educator”, Joe Torgeson summarizes the research
on prevention as a way to save children from reading failure. He writes:
“In this article, I want to lay out two sets of findings: (1) what we know
about the kind of instruction that weak readers need in kindergarten through
second grade to prevent them from ever entering the downward spiral, and (2)
what we know about the effectiveness of interventions that make use of this
knowledge.”

Identification and Assessment To Prevent Reading Failure in Young Children
By Joseph K. Torgesen

Children who get off to a poor start in reading rarely catch up, yet few
school districts have any systematic means for early identification of
those at risk of reading difficulty. Here’s how to change that.

Article from the American Educator, Spring/Summer 1998. Adobe acrobat
format (pdf).  Please click here to find and download the article.