Not every detail of teaching can be established by research, and not all research consists of expensive, randomised controlled trials, not least because, in education, a double-blind trial is impossible - the teacher needs to know what he or she is doing. The following points are derived from a combination of research and practical experience in applying and modifying its conclusions. They are offered on the basis of another old, scientific principle,that of replication. If they help you in your teaching, please let me know.
1. Phonics are the basis of reading in English, but they do not always tell us what we need to know, particularly in vowel (voice) sounds. How, for example, is a child who has read "not" to know that the beginning of "notice" does not conform to the pattern? It is essential to point out that phonics work most of the time, but do not tell us everything we need to know.
2. Usha Goswami's research in the early 1990s showed that children find it easier to recognise patterns at the ends of words (which she called rime) than at the beginning (which she termed onset). Practical point - some children find it very hard to hold the first letter or group of letters in their head, while working out/blending the remainder. Solution is to move from the word that caused the difficulty to another with the same letter/sound correspondence at the end. Eg, child can't read round, go to pound, then found, perhaps mound, and when the child can manage this, change the first letter to r, and they will probably get it right. This is learning by analogy, but in English, phonics themselves are a form of analogy, as they are not perfectly consistent.
3. Katharine Perera's doctoral research showed that children do not begin to phrase their reading naturally until they are reading around 60wpm accurately. This rate of reading is impossible if words have to be worked out individually. To speed things up, whenever a new word or pattern is learned, it needs to be practised with other words containing the same sound/letter correspondence. Slower learners need to have this much more systematically reinforced than those whose learning is straightforward. Various games are possible, but an enjoyable one is simply to put the words onto blank cards, and see how many the child gets right, later with a stopwatch to build speed.
4. Whenever an error is made or a hesitation worked on, recommence the reading from the start of the sentence or paragraph, so that the learning is reinforced by having the child meet the word again, in context. This technique helps build fluency.
5. I always sit at right-angles to the pupil, and on his or her right. This allows my right hand to direct attention to points in the text, and makes for easlier eye contact than is possible if you sit beside the pupil.
6. I always revise words that have been learned during the previous lesson, either by picking them out, or by having the learner re-read the passages we have worked on.
7. I only praise for getting things right, and then praise fulsomely, particularly where what has been read accurately had previously been misread.