One of the major implications of these findings is that training in oracy skills should not be expected to have much effect on reading comprehension until after the decoding skills of reading have been acquired. Thus language intervention programs should not be expected to make large impacts on reading comprehension performance until adequate decoding skills are acquired. The value of such programs should not be assessed in the first or second grades, but in the third grade and beyond, when reading decoding skills become adequate for comprehension of print, using the languaging skills and conceptual base developed by oracy training.

Stated otherwise, training in auding should not be expected to facilitate the learning of reading decoding skills. Rather, such training should impact on reading comprehension. Of course, to the extent that comprehension may aid in recognizing words, development of word meanings and concepts via oracy skills may improve the likelihood that a given word encountered in print is contained in the child's oracy language base, and hence the child may recognize the word using minimal graphic cues-that is, by partial decoding. But such recognition does not imply improved decoding skills. Learning to decode means learning to make the necessary print-to-speech conversions for representing graphemes as phonemes, and for synthesizing these phonemes into pronounceable units, usually words (although certain reading decoding programs use nonsense syllables and pronounceable units to force attention to the graphic display and minimize the amount of word recognition by comprehension, ct., Rodgers, 1967).