Assessing psycholinguistic orientation and decoding strategies for remedial and nonremedial readers

Remedial readers (8 to 9 year olds) were compared with nonremedial readers of the same age with younger children (6 to 7 year olds) in terms of their acceptance of a psycholinguistic approach vs. a decoding approach to reading, and in terms of the strategies they reported for word attack. Neither remedial nor nonremedial readers (except for a few older nonremedial readers) indicated willingness to skip words in a sentence, but remedial readers were less willing to skip over letters in a word, a psycholinguistic strategy that might allow them to find and use letter patterns to determine an unknown word. They also showed a heavy emphasis on phonic and a narrower range of potential strategies than did other children of the same age.