The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of evidence-based instructional practices for teaching word reading to students with RD. If a student performing at the 5th percentile progressed at this rate, he or she would perform at only the 9th percentile 8 years later ( Torgesen, Rashotte, Alexander, Alexander, & MacPhee, 2003). For example, in a study of special education reading instruction for students in Grades 3–6, Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin (1998) found that students’ standard scores in reading rose by an average of only 0.04 standard deviations per year. Unfortunately, traditional approaches to special education services often fail to close the gap between students with RD and average readers at best, special education programs tend to stabilize the reading development of students with disabilities so that they do not fall farther behind. In addition, early difficulties with basic reading skills typically result in limited time engaged in text reading ( Juel, 1988 Stanovich, 1986) because of this lack of exposure to text, a decoding problem may eventually become a generalized reading deficit characterized by low fluency, poor vocabulary, and limited world knowledge, all contributing to impaired reading comprehension (Stanovich).
Adding to the urgency of this situation is the fact that, with typical instruction, the vast majority of students who do not learn to read adequately in the early elementary grades remain impaired in reading as long as they are in school ( Francis, Shaywitz, Stuebing, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1996 Juel, 1988 Torgesen & Burgess, 1998). Poor reading has also been related to a higher incidence of delinquency ( Center on Crime, Communities, and Culture, 1997) and suicide ( Daniel et al., 2006). Students who do not learn to read adequately are more likely to have pervasive academic difficulties and are at high risk for school dropout ( Alliance for Excellent Education, 2002). The need to teach students with RD to read is urgent, as the consequences of low reading proficiency are serious. We will refer to this group of students collectively as students with serious word reading difficulties (RD). In this paper we will describe evidence-based word identification instruction for students with reading disabilities and for those with serious word reading difficulties who have not been identified as having reading disabilities, as students in these two groups have been found to respond similarly to kind of instruction we will describe ( Benner et al, 2010 Fletcher et al., 2007).
Although some students with disabilities are impaired in reading comprehension even though they can read words fairly accurately, the most commonly occurring reading disability is characterized by inaccurate word reading (Torgesen, 2000 2005). Many students who have other high-incidence disabilities (e.g., behavioral disorders) also have serious reading difficulties ( Benner, Nelson, Ralston, & Mooney, 2010). The majority of students identified with learning disabilities (LDs) are primarily impaired in reading ( Fletcher, Lyon, Fuchs, & Barnes, 2007).