This article has been taken directly from the following paper to provide clarity in description of this reading program. Complete original can be found at http://www.rmit.edu.au/departments/ps/staffpgs/hempens.htm#conf (November 2004)

Preventing and Overcoming Reading Failure: Recent Research and Proven Programs

Future Learning Partnerships Conference,
Catholic Education Office, Wed 4/10/2000

Dr Kerry Hempenstall, RMIT, Mr Peter Ryan, CEO

“Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” and “Reading Mastery”
Having noted the improvement in phonemic awareness and phonological recoding effected through the use of the Direct Instruction program, (Corrective Reading) with older remedial readers, many schools then display interest arose in examining the effects of a Direct Instruction program specifically designed for beginning readers: Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (Engelmann, Haddox, & Bruner, 1983). It is conventional wisdom that the earlier reading problems are addressed, the greater the likelihood of satisfactory and speedy resolution.

It is evident from research that significant improvement is possible in older poor readers over a period of months. However, many of these children were several years delayed in comparison with their age peers, and may require several years of additional support if they are to match their reading facile colleagues. Many of these children have experienced the debilitating sequence of interacting skill deficits described by Stanovich (1986) as the Matthew effect. For example, the early lack of phonemic awareness leads to a failure to master the alphabetic principle. This further entails slow, error-prone decoding, the overuse of contextual cues, and poor comprehension. This resultant laborious, unsatisfying reading style leads students to avoid text, with a consequential reduction in vocabulary growth, and a broadening of the skill deficit. The lack of practice means fewer words are able to be read by sight, thus restricting automaticity.

The continued expenditure of cognitive attention on decoding leaves few resources available for comprehension, and so the student’s difficulties are compounded. The longer this set of circumstances prevails, the further delayed the student becomes, the more pervasive becomes the problem, and the more difficult the rescue operation. Hence the concern for intervening earlier in this escalating chain.

If the operation is commenced earlier, when the primary deficit is restricted to phonemic awareness, and it is this deficit that is targeted, it is reasonable to anticipate a more efficacious process. If increased phonemic awareness and an early understanding of the alphabetic principle are the outcomes (thus precluding the by products of early reading failure), the intervention at this stage should be more effective, efficient and socially just.

Although the content of the Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (Engelmann, Haddox, & Bruner, 1983) was developed earlier than most of the research into phonemic awareness, it is now becoming more evident that the combination of letter-sound instruction with phonemic awareness training (as evidenced in the 100 Lessons program) is a potent one in stimulating early reading development (Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991, 1993, 1995; Ehri, 1987; Hatcher et al., 1994; Perfetti et al., 1987, Torgesen et al., 1994). However, a wide range of phonemic awareness tasks have been incorporated into phonemic awareness programs, and a vital question (especially for at-risk students) is what combination of tasks is optimally related to accelerated reading development?

Torgesen, Morgan, and Davis (1992) tested two types of phonemic awareness training approaches - blending only, and a combination of blending and segmenting - and compared them to a language experience control group. The small groups trained three times per week for 20 minutes for a total of 7-8 weeks. The blending only group improved only on blending, their segmentation skills remaining similar to that of the controls. Similarly, their ability to learn in a reading analogue task did not significantly exceed that of the control group, indicating a lack of generalisation of this skill to this reading task. In contrast, the combination of blending and segmenting led to significant improvements in both skills, and evidence of transfer to the reading task. The authors acknowledge that the introduction of letter-sound training may have even further enhanced the transfer to reading tasks had they incorporated such strategy.

Davidson and Jenkins (1994) in a similar study included a segmentation-only training group, and while they noted some transfer to a reading analogue task for that group, they too argued against teaching only one type of phonemic awareness strategy, as generalisation of awareness is likely to be compromised.

O’Connor, Slocum, and Jenkins (1995) reported a study in which the combination of letter-sounds, blending and segmenting instruction led to educationally significant gains for at-risk beginning readers. The program intervention lasted a total of five hours (15 minutes twice weekly for 10 weeks). A second experimental group had a much greater range of phonemic awareness activities (in addition to segmentation and blending) but showed no increase in reading development over the first experimental group. The authors argue that both experimental groups were able to generalise the phonemic awareness skills they were taught, that is, they attained phonological insight, and were able to relate it to the reading process. Importantly, their findings suggest that the combination of blending and segmenting is sufficient to create this condition.

Lovett et al. (1994) used a 35 lesson training program developed from Reading Mastery, and Corrective Reading to teach word identification to dyslexic students for one hour four times per week. They compared results to a control group taught a study skills program, and achieved highly significant posttest gains for the experimental group - effect sizes (d ) of 0.76, 1.11, and 0.90 on the three training measures. The transfer to real words was impressive , and "was based on the successful training of what is considered the core deficit of developmental dyslexia: phonological processing and nonword reading skill" (p. 818). Further, they argue, "this training success rests on embedding letter-sound training in an intensive phonological training program" (p. 819).

Thus, there is evidence to support the use of a program that explicitly teaches letter-sound correspondence, and which simultaneously links this knowledge to two critical phonemic awareness skills, blending and segmenting. This should not surprise since segmenting and blending are the phonemic awareness processes most closely involved in reading, and letter-sound knowledge is both a prompt, and a necessary condition for this phonemic awareness knowledge to be useful in reading. The 100 Lessons program meets these dual requirements of theoretically and empirically validated practice.

The Program
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (Engelmann, Haddox, & Bruner, 1983) was developed as a program for parents to use with preschool or struggling readers. It was from a school-based reading program. Reading Mastery Fast Cycle I/II Reading Program (Engelmann & Bruner, 1988).

The program follows the Direct Instruction principles of design, and the content emphasises the explicit teaching of phonemic awareness (rhyming, blending, segmenting) along with 44 letter sound correspondences. These selected correspondences allow for the decoding of 95% of the sounds in the students' typically available reading texts, and close approximations for 98% (Burmeister, 1975, cited in Grossen, 1995).

A specially developed orthography reduces the number of such correspondences to an attainable number (some programs had taught up to 200 such correspondences) and allows for the introduction (Lesson 13) of interesting sentences while still controlling the text for regularity (albeit artificially). This Distar orthography (Table 38) enables a range of interesting irregular words to be decoded using the segment/blend strategy, thus providing for students both practice and a developing assurance that the strategy is a successful one, worth persevering with until familiarity produces whole word recognition. This feature is very important as students can be overwhelmed by the number of irregular words in uncontrolled text - the result being an inability to appreciate the value of the recoding strategy, and a consequent failure to focus on developing the skill.

The orthography has several useful features that enable a variety of text, avoiding the "Nan can fan Dan" limitation of devising regular text when few sounds are known by students. Visual cues are provided to promote the distinction between long and short vowels, through the use of a macron over the relevant long vowel (See Table below). Words with CVCe (consonant-vowel-consonant-e) sequences are regularised through the use of small letters that are not pronounced. Hence lake is written as lake (with macron), and can be decoded by blending the three sounds. The teaching of separate sounds for two letter blends, such as er, wh, sh, th, ch, and qu, similarly allows for the regularisation of troublesome words such as she and where. Not all words are made regular, as that would teach a misrule - that all words are regular in natural text - thus a few words are allowed to continue as irregulars (e.g., to, was, said). Learning such a misrule would make the subsequent transition to normal orthography difficult for students. The intention is to teach sufficient words in this manner to ensure that students are aware of exceptions, but not so many that the utility of mastering phonological recoding is jeopardised.

Distar Orthography

Reading Mastery Fast Cycle Teacher’s Guide (Engelmann & Bruner, 1984)

The correspondences are introduced in a sequence different to that in the alphabet, to reduce the ambiguity associated with similar shapes or sounds being introduced at nearly the same time. For example, /d/ is introduced in Lesson 12, whereas /b/ is taught in Lesson 54. An additional distinguishing prompt sees the "ball" on the /d/ assigned a stretched (almost elliptical) shape (until Lesson 74) to separate it further from its mirror image /b/. This pair of letters often presents problems of interference (reversals) to young readers, who are sometimes accused of neurological deficits to account for a largely instructional problem. Another rationale for the atypical sequence of letter introduction is to enlarge the range of words that can be created from the earliest stages of the program.
Words are first introduced in Lesson 3, and considerable attention is paid to oral reading practice with immediate corrective feedback. Research support for the Distar programs (later revamped as the Reading Mastery series) has been strong. See a meta analysis by Adams and Englemann (1996) that reported an effect size (d) of 0.68 for 44 acceptable comparisons involving Reading Mastery and other beginning reading programs.

The 100 Lessons is very carefully constructed. Apart from the controlled vocabulary, the program prescribes the tasks to be presented, the examples chosen, and how often they occur. Even the teacher's wording is specified through the use of a script. This high level of control is based on the principles of faultless communication developed by Engelmann and Carnine (1982).

The program emphasises letter sounds rather than letter names because of the functionality of the former in beginning reading, and to avoid the opportunity for unnecessary confusion entailed by teaching both sounds and names simultaneously. Names are introduced in Lesson 73, and capital letters in Lesson 81. The phonemic awareness skills of blending and segmenting are taught orally initially, because there are fewer elements in the oral than the written task, and hence less likelihood of error. Blending is taught as a simultaneous rather than discrete-sound format - “mmmaaat” rather than “mmm-aaa-t” because the stimulus sequence of sounds is really a stretched form of the word “mat”, rather than a broken form in which the elements are completely separated. The authors argue that the mastery of continuous blending is a worthwhile objective because it provides more salient clues to the pronunciation of words. The oral blending activities proceed from large intra-word clusters to single phoneme blends.

“Let’s play say-it-fast.
My turn: motor (pause) boat.
(Pause) Say it fast. “Motorboat”.

From: Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (Engelmann, Haddox, & Bruner, 1983, p.31).

To assist the mastery of simple two phoneme blends an additional step is included in the model-test sequence. The sequence becomes model-lead-test, thus providing an additional prompt.

“First I’ll say am slowly. Listen: aaammm.
Now it’s your turn to say the word slowly with me. Take a deep breath and we’ll say aaammm. Get ready. aaammm
Your turn to say the word slowly by yourself. Say aaammm. Get ready. “Aaammm.”

From: Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (Engelmann, Haddox & Bruner, 1983, p.31).

Blending activities begin in the first lesson, and segmenting written words into constituent phonemes in Lesson 9. This latter process is assisted by the use of marks under the word that prompt the sounds one by one at the required pace. See the table below for an example of a blending sequence.

Script for Blending Activity

Task 9 WORD READING
1. (Point to sat.) You’re going to touch under the sounds as you sound out this word and say it fast. (Touch under s.) What’s the first sound you’re going to say? “sss.” (Touch under a.) What’s the next sound you’re going to say? “aaa.” (Touch under t.) What’s the next sound you’re going to say? “t.”
2. Touch the first ball of the arrow. Take a deep breath and say the sounds as you touch under them. Get ready. Go. (Child touches under s, a, and t and says “sssaaat.” (Repeat until firm.)
3. Say it fast. “sat.” Yes, what word? “sat.” You read the word sat. Good reading.

From: Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (Engelmann, Haddox & Bruner, 1983, p. 53).

Other activities include: rhyming to promote a sensitivity to word families based on common endings (or rimes); sounds-writing because it prompts attention to the letter shape, and helps forge the association between shape and sound; story reading (from Lesson 13) involving successive segmenting and blending; and, picture comprehension (from Lesson 13). Pictures are provided after the story is finished to assist comprehension, but to avoid the picture cues being used in place of print cues in the decoding task. Sight words (from Lesson 13). Words that have been practised sufficiently often (using the segment-blend procedure) for them to begin to become familiar are “read the fast way”, that is, the child slides his finger under the letters to prompt a thorough viewing, but does not sound out the word, rather he reads it orthographically.

Supporting this cumulative skill acquisition and skill synthesis model are clear scripted correction procedures. There are two basic principles - the first is that correction be applied immediately following the error, rather than delayed until the end of a sentence, or waiting for self-correction. The purpose of the program is to teach accurate decoding of words based on information provided by the print, rather than relying on contextual cues to prompt a word’s pronunciation. Hence the correction redirects the child’s attention to the source of the information - the word. The second principle specifies the basic correction structure - the child is notified of the error, given the correct response, allowed to practise this response, and finally tested on the original task before moving on. Additionally, a delayed test presented later in the lesson is often recommended.

The change from Distar orthography to normal print occurs over a three lesson period (Lessons 74-76), and after that time all print is conventional. By this stage the child is reading stories of about 200 words orthographically, and answering comprehension questions. According to the program designers the child should be reading at around a Year Two level at the completion of the program. The shift from letter by letter decoding to orthographic whole word recognition occurs in students who are able to analyse fully word structure (Stanovich, 1991), and have had many opportunities for practice of such words in isolation, and in connected text - particularly with words containing high frequency spelling patterns (Ehri, 1992).

According to Ehri’s (1992) work, the most effective way for beginning readers to store sight words in memory is to analyse fully the sounds in the spoken word and to match those sounds to the letters in the printed form of words. To do this, readers must know how to segment pronunciations of words into their smallest sounds, and they must know which letters typically symbolise those sounds. (Gaskins, Ehri, Cress, O’Hara, & Donnelly, 1996, p. 315)
Given that the content of the 100 Lessons program focuses on the skill areas currently accepted as critical, that the style of teaching employs empirically supported effective-teaching principles, and that the instructional design principles ensure ample massed and spaced practice - it is reasonable to anticipate that the authors' claims of decoding instruction leads to eventual skilled whole-word recognition are reasonable claims.

The selection of the parent-based program over the Reading Mastery series is often based on cost. Few schools are prepared to invest the relatively large sum of money in a program for a few at-risk beginning readers. The Reading Mastery series was written as a basal series designed for general classroom beginning reading instruction, but is not generally attractive to schools for that purpose. The 100 Lessons program, however, is cheap and in the author’s experience, effective if presented faithfully, either by parent or teacher. As the program is designed for one-to-one teaching, there are some modifications required for group instruction. If the teacher involved is skilled in presenting the Corrective Reading program, it is not difficult to incorporate the group-signalling, correction, and choral/individual turn-taking strategies from one program to the other. The most evident changes involve: the use of the blackboard to reproduce the graphics presented in the book; using the finger-slide signal at the board rather than on the page; providing roneo sheets containing the words and sounds for that lesson to allow the students to use the finger-slide prompt; and, using a hand-drop signal for the orally-presented tasks to ensure simultaneous choral responding.
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