Two methods of decoding instruction were compared. Participants were kindergartners who knew letter sounds but could not decode nonwords, M = 5.6 years. The segmented phonation treatment taught students to convert graphemes to phonemes by breaking the speech stream ("sss -- aaa -- nnn") before blending. The connected phonation treatment…

In this experiment, we examined whether beginning readers benefit more from grapheme-phoneme decoding (GPD) than from whole-syllable decoding (WSD) instruction in learning to read and write words. Sixty Brazilian Portuguese-speaking first graders (M age = 6 years 1 month) who knew letter names but could not read or write words were randomly…

Reading Rescue (Reading Rescue), a research and evidence-based programme for struggling readers (Ehri et al., 2007; Miles et al., 2018), was developed by an academic in response to the cost and lack of explicit letter, phonemic awareness and phonics instruction in Reading Recovery. Reading Rescue represents a pathway from research to practice. An…

Central coherence is the ability to perceive and connect salient information in a context such as a narrative text. Individuals with autism exhibit a detail-focused cognitive style of processing information that overlooks connections and shows weak central coherence. A six-session instructional intervention to foster coherence processing was…

Orthographic facilitation refers to the boost in vocabulary learning that is provided when spellings are shown during study periods, but not during testing. The current study examined orthographic facilitation in beginning readers and whether directing their attention to print enhances the effect. In an experiment, first graders (N = 45) were…

An experiment compared the impact of more and less semantically connected sentence contexts on vocabulary learning. Third graders (N = 40) were taught the definitions and meanings of six unfamiliar verbs: "anticipate," "attain," "devise," "restrain," "wield," and "persist." The verbs were…