Phonic Generalizations--A Survey of Seven College Level Reading Textbooks.

Results of the examination of teacher's manuals, grades one through four, that accompany a number of basal reading series used in schools in Staten Island, New York, indicated that although teacher's manuals included many phonic rules, none of the examined texts gave any utility or frequency data or cited any research studies to support the inclusion of the selected phonic rules. This discovery led to the decision to investigate seven undergraduate level texts used to teacb reading methods courses in colleges and universities in the New York City metropolitan area to see if they adequately prepared and acquainted future teachers with the research available on the value and limitations of phonic generalizations. The study revealed that only two college texts included references to the major studies of T. L. Clymer (1963), M. H. Bailey (1967), and R. Emans (1967). Two texts cited other research studies. Each of the seven texts presented a number of phonic rules, yet did not give any utility data to support the usefulness of the rules presented. No studies after 1971 were cited, although none of the texts had been revised or published any earlier than 1975, and little overlap was found in the cautions presented in the texts for using phonic rules. (MKM)