This mixed methods study explored the influence of an interactive writing intervention on preschoolers' skills of emergent literacy, as well as teacher perceptions of the intervention. Before the intervention assessment scores were collected on the subscales of letter name identification, letter sound identification, onset-rime blending, and…

Children with Down syndrome exhibit unique learning characteristics that impact their educational progress. Despite this, research on effective reading interventions specifically tailored for this population remains limited. The present study aimed to find the best ways to teach teaching foundational reading skills to children with Down syndrome.…

The purpose of this study was to explore five developmental patterns of English letter-name knowledge for emergent bilingual children. We considered five patterns demonstrated by English monolingual children: visual similarity effect, uppercase familiarity effect, first name/first initial effects, consonant-order effect, and frequency effect. We…

This paper describes name-related literacy practices in a multilingual preschool classroom and their implications for emergent biliteracy. We draw on a translingual framework to understand children's name-writing activities and how bilingual children's early literacy interacts with, and at times disrupts, the written conventions of named…

Substantial evidence exists suggesting that access to articulatory gestures during instruction improves students' phonological awareness skills, but researchers have yet to explore the role of articulatory gestures in initial phonics instruction. The purpose of this study was to examine if visual access to articulatory gestures (i.e., mouth cues)…

Background: Young children clearly know quite a bit about the conventions of written language; for instance, 5-year-old children are sensitive to the fact that words tend to include both consonants and vowels, rather than just one or the other. The core theoretical debate lies in whether this understanding of sub-lexical orthographic regularities…

Purpose: Phonological awareness (PA), the awareness of sounds in spoken words, is strongly linked to reading outcomes. However, there is an ongoing debate regarding the effectiveness of PA instruction without including print (i.e. PA without exposure to words or letters). Specifically, is PA-only instruction just as effective in improving reading…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the verbal interventions produced by teachers to support pupils' development of orthographic knowledge through invented spelling in three research-based intervention conditions: conventional (C condition), proximal (P condition), and progressive complexification (PC condition). We recorded six…

Learning to read is one of the most important components of education and literacy skills in early childhood have a significant impact on later reading success. There is an abundance of quantitative research focused on reading, known as the science of reading. However, gaps and flaws have been identified in the research, indicating that an…

In our first article, we outlined some of the reasons for reading failure at the Early Childhood level and beyond, discussed common challenges students face, and explored essential components for quality reading instruction. We'll revisit the students you met in the first article to provide a window into how the Science of Reading can be…

The ability to recognize and name the sounds of alphabet letters is a crucial prerequisite for students as they embark on their journey to learn how to read. Regrettably, some children face significant challenges in this area. In this single-case multiple baseline study, we utilized mnemonic pictures to facilitate the memorization of the…

Discrimination of reversible mirrored letters (e.g., d and b) poses a challenge when learning to read as it requires overcoming "mirror invariance," an evolutionary-old perceptual tendency of processing mirror images as equivalent. The present study investigated "when," in reading development, mirror-image discrimination…

Since 2012, when preparatory grade (PG) became compulsory in Romania for 6-year olds, little understanding has been gained of how children's literacy evolves in PG, although over the same period, Romanian 15-year olds' reading performance has shown no signs of improvement (Noveanu et al., 2023). Children enter school with broadly varying literacy…

The objective for beginning writers is to learn how to generate alphabet-letters which are recognisable and easy to read. This study investigated the accuracy of Year 1 and 2 children's alphabet-letter-writing by evaluating their alphabet and orthographic knowledge, following evidence which identifies these skills as important for correctly…

Background: Failure to learn early reading skills leads to lower reading comprehension later in elementary school (Double et al., 2019; Paige et al., 2019), which can then lead to poverty, underemployment, and increased likelihood of being incarcerated (World Literacy Foundation, 2018). Early reading skills are best developed in kindergarten…