Thirty-seven students from a suburban community in the southern United States were randomly assigned to receive 30 minutes of additional instruction each day in their usual language arts curriculum or 30 minutes of instruction with the Direct Instruction program, Funnix Beginning Reading. Instruction for the Funnix group was provided by high school-aged tutors, trained and supervised by an experienced teacher. Pretesting before instruction began indicated no significant differences between the two groups in letter naming fluency or initial sound fluency. However, by winter and spring the students in the Funnix group had significantly higher scores on numerous measures of beginning literacy. These results occurred with simple comparison of means, comparisons of scores to established benchmarks, and multivariate analyses that controlled for initial levels of skill and minority status. The results also appeared when a reduced sample that individually matched children on their pretest scores was used. (author abstract)