Fostering the development of reading skill through supplemental instruction: results for Hispanic and non-Hispanic students.

This article reports the effects of a 2-year supplemental reading program for students in kindergarten through third grade 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 2-year intervention, students who received the supplemental instruction performed significantly better than their matched controls on measures of entry-level reading skills (i.e., letter-word identification and word attack), oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The benefits of the instruction were still clear 2 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.

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The 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, Pesetsky, & 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; Fuchs & Deno, 1991; Share & Stanovich, 1995) suggest that struggling readers have difficulty learning to recognize words as whole orthographic units or by using phonetic cues. Although we do not yet know the conditions required to prevent word recognition difficulties for all students, we do know that beginning readers benefit from systematic, explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and decoding skills (Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, Schatschneider, & Mehta, 1998; Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1997; Vellutino et al., 1996).

Reading Failure Among Hispanic Students

The number of children with limited English proficiency in U.S. public schools has risen dramatically in the past 20 years and continues to grow (August & Hakuta, 1997). These students make up about 5.5% of all public school students, with more than 70% speaking Spanish as their first language. Young Spanish-speaking students in U.S. schools have lower levels of reading achievement in English than other students (Fitzgerald, 1995) and are about twice as likely as non-Hispanic Whites to be reading below average for their age (Snow, Bums, & Griffin, 1998). Many Spanish-speaking students trail behind their classmates academically throughout elementary school and are referred in disproportionate numbers for special education services (Ortiz & Graves, 2001). Between 1976 and 1994, the percentage of Hispanic children identified as learning disabled increased from 24% to 51%. Given the low levels of reading achievement among Spanish-speaking students, and the long-lasting, negative consequences of reading failure, ensuring that these students learn to read should be a high priority.

Reading and Behavior Problems