Developing individualized programs to teach reading Resumen

Abstract

This paper summarizes a line of research that seeks to develop individualized programs to teach reading. The main goal in reading instruction is to establish the repertoire of a literate person: reading with fluency and comprehension and mastering written expression. The alphabetic system enables one to learn just a few units and recombine them in order to read or write any word the language. The school system has been, however, heavily challenged to achieve this goal. A common finding in the reading research literature is that any teaching method, no matter how good it may be, will fail with a number of students. Our initial studies were conducted with children that had been exposed to regular school instruction for at least one year, and had failed to learn. We devised teaching programs aimed to establish word recognition, as a first step in the direction of the more ambitious goal of teaching reading and spelling with both comprehension and fluency. These programs were developed along several years of research and attempt to incorporate various procedures used in basic stimulus control research. The paper describes the general approach and illustrates its outcomes with data from a series of those previous studies.