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Second-grade basal reading programs generally provide little help toward this end, as they start where they left off at the end of grade one. Given well-structured review, children who have simply forgotten will generally recover quickly. In contrast, for children who fell or sneaked through the cracks in first grade, identification and assistance are urgent. In school lore, second grade is broadly viewed as children's last chance. Those who are not on track by third grade have little chance of ever catching up (Bloom, 1964; Carter, 1984; Shaywitz et al., 1992).

A major task for the second-grade teacher, then, is to ensure that all students understand the nature and utility of the alphabetic principle. To develop the children's phonemic awareness and knowledge of basic letter-sound correspondences, spelling instruction is important. Beginning with short, regular words, such as pot, pat, and pan, the focus of these instructional activities is gradually extended to more complex spelling patterns and words, including long vowel spellings, inflections, and so on.

In later grades, such instruction should extend to spellings and meanings of prefixes, suffixes, and word roots: leading children to notice such patterns across many different examples supports learning the target words and helps children transfer spelling patterns and word analysis strategies beyond the lesson, into their own reading and writing (Calfee and Henry, 1986; Henry, 1989). Several guides for spelling instruction (e.g., Bear et al., 1996; Moats, 1995; Moats and Foorman, 1997) based on research on spelling development (e.g., Templeton and Bear, 1992; Treiman, 1993) are available, although no evaluative data on their effectiveness in ordinary classrooms exists.

When readers cannot recognize a word or a spelling pattern and have no one to ask, they have one of two options.  They can use context or pictures to guess or finesse its identity, or they can sound it out. Each of these options produces its own patterns of error and dysfluency. Laboratory research with good and poor readers at second grade and beyond has repeatedly demonstrated that, whereas good readers become as fast and accurate at recognizing words without context as with, poor readers as a group remain differentially dependent on context. An overreliance on context is symptomatic