The Development of Phonological Awareness and Orthographic Processing in Reading Recovery

Reading Recovery is a program intended to accelerate the progress of the lowest-achieving 20% of first-grade children so that they are able to perform as well as the average children in their classrooms (Klein, Kelly, & Pinnell, 1997). Reading Recovery has demonstrated impressive rates of success and a number of evaluations have supported the program’s effectiveness (e.g., Center, Wheldall, Freeman, Outhred, & McNaught, 1995; Shanahan & Barr, 1995; Wasik & Slavin, 1993). For example, in their conservative analysis, Center et al. (1995) found that Reading Recovery was able to accelerate the reading progress of 35% of the children who would not, under other programs, reach the level of their successful peers. In addition, group programs that are based on similar theoretical perspectives have been successful in increasing children’s reading achievement (e.g., Fountas & Pinnell, 1996; Hiebert, 1994; Taylor, Short, & Shearer, 1990). Because Reading Recovery educators view the program as a meaning-oriented approach, and consider one of its major goals to be the improvement of students’ ability to read and comprehend connected text, evaluations of Reading Recovery have stressed text reading as an outcome measure. However, there are aspects of Abstract