English as a Second Language – Decoding

ESL students who requested an accelerated approach to developing their decoding skills received instruction in the Seeing Stars program. On average, they achieved excellent improvements on all measures of reading. They made large (statistically significant) standard score changes on seven of eight reading measures. Vocabulary was not a targeted measure of instruction. As a result of significant improvements in Phonemic Awareness and orthographic awareness (Symbol Imagery), they experienced an average 24-point percentile increase in Word Recognition and a 20-point percentile increase in Comprehension. These increases in their English reading skills put these students well within the normal range (25th-75 percentile).