Increasing oral reading proficiency through overcorrection and phonic analysis.

The comparative efficacy of overcorrection, phonic analysis, and no-intervention control condition in an alternating treatments design on the number of oral reading errors made by 3 children with moderate mental retardation was evaluated. During overcorrection each oral reading error resulted in the teacher providing the correct word and the child pointing to and saying the word correctly five times before rereading the sentence in which the error word occurred. During phonic analysis, the teacher directed the child to attend to various phonetic elements of the error word and to "sound out" the word. Results showed that the children made fewer errors under both training conditions when compared to the no-intervention control. Initially, the overcorrection procedure was more effective than phonic analysis in reducing the children's oral reading errors, but this changed with further training, and phonic analysis proved to be more effective with all children. These data suggest that both overcorrection and phonic analysis are effective in increasing oral reading proficiency but phonic analysis is more effective with extended training.