Exploring Theoretically Relevant Word Reading Instructional Elements: Moving beyond Component Training toward Building Strong Lexical Representations in Children with Dyslexia

Abstract The English orthography contains many “complex words” in which relationships between orthography, phonology, morphology, and semantics are relatively opaque. Throughout school, children encounter increasingly complex words from which they are expected to make meaning. Students' ability to read these words depends on the skills they bring to the task and the demands of a given word. Reading theory suggests that instructional elements that promote statistical learning, flexibility in decoding, and semantic‐to‐orthography connections may be important instructional elements for inclusion in reading instruction to promote the formation of high‐quality lexical representations, especially for students with dyslexia. We explore these recent theoretically motivated instructional components for teaching complex words and argue for further exploration of instructional approaches that strengthen the entire reading system by strengthening orthography, phonology, and semantics as well as connections between these components to support the formation of strong lexical representations that can be applied to both reading and spelling complex words.