Vol. 18, No. 31	May 13, 1999

Professor honored for his pioneering reading research

Richard L. Venezky, Unidel Professor of Educational Studies and Professor of Computer and Information Sciences, recently received a Distinguished Fellow Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, an honor bestowed every two years to a single outstanding U.S. or European researcher.

Venezky's "pioneering work on the relationships between spellings and sounds in English provides the foundation for understanding what the reading process is all about, and what is lacking in children who have trouble learning to read," according to the Society's award announcement.

Soon after receiving his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University in 1965, the Society reported, Venezky "tabulated and analyzed the spelling-to-sound correspondences in the 20,000 most common words of English," which was "no small feat with the computers of thae 1960s." His resulting book, The Structure of English Orthography (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1970), became one of the most frequently cited references in the field of reading research.

He went on to study how children learn these relationships between spellings and sounds, and why some have difficulty making such connections. He also has written extensively about the history of research on reading.

Venezky joined the UD faculty in 1977 following positions with Tel Aviv University in Israel and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Most recently, Venezky has served as a visiting scholar in the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement. His other honors include membership in the International Reading Association's Reading Hall of Fame and a 1982 Distinguished Faculty Award from UD's College of Education. He is a fellow in the National Conference on Research in English, and in the American Psychological Society.

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