In 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that learning to read is a fundamental human right and failure to provide appropriate education for students with reading disabilities is discriminatory (Moore v. British Columbia, 2012). In Ontario, Canada's most populous province, the Human Rights Commission's inquiry in 2022 found the province's…

Purpose: Shared reading provides preschool-age children with the opportunity to learn novel, low-frequency words. Abundant empirical evidence demonstrates that children can learn the meanings of such words during shared reading, referred to as "semantic learning." However, less is known about whether children learn the spellings of words…

This qualitative study surfaced beliefs around reading instruction and reading development at the onset of an elementary literacy methods course. Prior understandings and knowledge around reading instruction and reading acquisition emerge through various experiences and have the potential to contradict notions presented by teacher educators. This…

Background: The Alouette-R (2005) by Lefavrais is one of the most widely used tools to assess reading skills in French. However, this instrument does not have normative data specific to the French-speaking population of Quebec, Canada. Aims: The validity of an assessment being strongly compromised when using inappropriate norms, the first…

We report results from children learning to read in one of four different languages: Croatian, English, Estonian and Swedish. The languages all have an alphabetical script but vary greatly on the dimension deep-shallow (or complexity-simplicity, or opacity-transparency), i.e., how close orthography and phonology are related. These languages also…