Decoding Only?--The Effectiveness of Two Programs (One Developmental, One Remedial) Designed Specifically to Teach Decoding Utilizing a Decoding-Only Strategy.

The author reports two federally funded programs designed to teach decoding utilizing a perceptual conditioning approach. Teachers in the projects worked with small groups or with individuals. The primary materials were word cards in the five decoding kits published by Easier-to-Learn materials. The cards were arranged in 125-word groupings according to the common letter clusters. In training sessions two or more cluster groupings were studied in terms of the visual and auditory structure of the whole word. Up to 20 words were utilized with the same letter cluster in eigher the initial, medial, or final position. The goal was to have the learner respond, by habit, to the word structure that contributes most to the sound of the whole word. The summer-school program, funded under Title I, had 56 remedial readers ranging mainly from third to fifth grades. The developmental 1-year program, funded under Title III, had 217 students ranging from first to fifth grades. Pretest and post-test scores on the word analysis section of the Durrell Analysis of Reading Difficulty indicated (1) that the average improvement for the 1-year program youngsters was approximately 2 years and (2) that the average gain of the summer-program students was slightly less than 1 year, with the boys' average gain approximately 4 months less than the girls'. The students were tested on the 220 Dolch Sight Words before and after the program, and an overall improvement of 35 percent was found. (AW)