Chapter published in:
Developmental Perspectives in Written Language and Literacy: In honor of Ludo Verhoeven
Edited by Eliane Segers and Paul van den Broek
[Not in series 206] 2017
► pp. 277–293

How to teach children reading and spelling

| | Behavioural Science Institute and School of Educational Sciences, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
| | Stichting TGM, Zuthpen, the Netherlands

The effectiveness of the Dutch reading and spelling didactic ‘How to teach children reading and spelling’ (HTCRS), developed by Schraven (1994/2013) was empirically tested in children attending special education. HTCRS is based on the principles of direct and classroom instruction, and the task analysis of reading and spelling. Reading and spelling performance of first-grade pupils from three different schools was longitudinally tested from the beginning until the end of the first school year. There were no differences in literacy skills at the beginning, but at the end of the year substantially better performance emerged for those pupils who received instruction according to the HTCRS approach. Theoretically-based principles underlying HTRCS are presented as well as the main aspects of the didactics.

Keywords: reading, spelling, direct instruction, classroom instruction, task analysis, primary (special) education, experiment, Dutch language
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Theoretical principles
    • 1.2Specifics of ‘How to teach children reading and spelling’
    • 1.3Preliminary empirical findings
    • 1.4Goal
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Materials
      • Word reading (Drie Minuten Toets [Three Minutes Test]; Verhoeven, 1994)
      • Text reading (AVI; van den Berg & te Lintelo, 1977)
      • 8-word dictation (SVS, see next paragraph)
      • Spelling test (SVS; van den Bosch, Gillijns, Krom, & Moelands, 1991
    • 2.3Procedure
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Word reading
    • 3.2Text-reading
    • 3.38-word dictation
    • 3.4Spelling test
  • 4.Discussion
  • Authors’ note
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 21 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.206.17bos
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