Abstract

Interest in beginning reading is currently intense—the source of mandates by legislators and debates among scholars. A new twist has developed in the form of mandates by federal and state legislators for “research-proven” programs (U.S. Congress, 1998). Even with generous definitions of what constitutes research, investigations of beginning reading instruction from the early 1980s, when Barr (1984) summarized the topic in the first volume of the Handbook of Reading Research, to the early 1990s were limited in number. The second volume of the Handbook of Reading Research (Barr, Kamil, Mosenthal, & Pearson, 1991) saw little attention to beginning reading instruction. It was with Adams’s (1990) review of research on beginning reading acquisition, the growing popularity of Reading Recovery (Clay, 1985, 1993), actions in legislatures, and discussions in the media that beginning reading instruction became a focus of researchers’ attention.