Article #3 Teaching Tips 10 Rules for Teaching

Litt, D.G. (2007, March). 10 Rules for Reading. The Reading Teacher, 60(6), 570–574. doi: 10.1598/RT.60.6.7.

In the author's experience, a significant source of reading difficulty for many beginning and struggling readers are misconceptions about print concepts so basic teachers assume their students are aware of them. Many children fail to grasp implicit principles of print such as the following: the reader cannot make up the words, the order of letters within a word makes a difference, and each letter in a word must be considered.

Using brief vignettes from her work with beginning and struggling readers, the author draws attention to these often-overlooked misconceptions. The author explains how she helped students overcome their faulty understandings by providing “rules” about reading, which enabled them to regulate their own reading.


Deborah Litt, was a former elementary level Reading Recovery Teacher and Reading Specialist.
The 10 rules are: (1) Read only what's on the page, don't make it up. (2) Reading always makes sense. (3) When reading doesn't make sense, find out what is wrong and correct it. (4) If the words and the pictures are different , go by the words. (5) Say the words as they are written. (6) Say the part of the word you know. (7) Always read form left to right. (8) You can't change the order of the letters. (9) Only make sounds for letters that you see in the word. (10) You're not allowed to ignore any letters in a word. The strength of the article is it shows strategies that students can use to correct 10 misconceptions of reading. If students continue using ineffective reading behaviors they will be stunted and he or she may have problems with comprehension. The rules are not entirely what is paramount in the discussion, the early intervention with the students before negative habits are formed is the most critical. Each teacher can develop a strategy that works in their classroom and assess students' comprehension of the 10 principles for the struggling readers helps them to learn the positive strategies when reading. A weakness of the article is that although the author used studies from Marie Clay (1993) and Linnea Ehri (1997 & 1998), she only studied her school experience of the studies. Implications of the findings are that many teachers assume certain text information is common knowledge and each teacher should assess struggling readers to assure he or she has full comprehension of the 10 rules for reading. Each classroom teacher should develop a plan to work with students on the rules he or she does not understand to produce effective reading skills.