To develop reading acquisition in an effective way, it is necessary to take into account three goals during the process: automatic word recognition, or development of phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, and a desire for reading. This article focuses on promoting phonemic awareness in English as a second language through a program called…

This study examined parents' goals for reading ABC books with their children and their perceptions of page features. Factor analysis of a questionnaire answered by 225 parents of junior and senior kindergarten students revealed four goals for reading alphabet books. In order of importance as rated by parents the goals were: Learning to Read,…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine whether kindergarten-reading achievement could be increased by implementing Response to Intervention (RtI) strategies. Kindergarten children (N = 290) who were identified as at-risk for reading difficulties were assigned to receive intervention through a) small reading groups (SRG), b)…

In this technical report, we describe a study examining the internal structures of the easyCBM reading measures, Grades K-5. Data were gathered from a convenience sample of 114 Kindergarten students, 43 first graders, 82 second graders, 100 third graders, 109 fourth graders, and 71 fifth graders attending schools in Oregon, Georgia, South…

The controlled and free speech of 15 Jordanian male and female children with cleft lip and/or palate was analyzed to account for the different phonological processes exhibited. Study participants were divided into three main age groups, 4 years 2 months to 4 years 7 months, 5 years 3 months to 5 years 6 months, and 6 years 4 months to 6 years 6…

Teaching a child to read is one of the greatest gifts we can give to that individual and to society as a whole, and yet many students exit school without the necessary literacy skills. For decades, research has demonstrated the importance of phonemic awareness in the development of the alphabetic principle, a prerequisite for competent reading,…

Background: Rhyme awareness is one of the earliest forms of phonological awareness to develop and is assessed in many developmental studies by means of a simple rhyme task. The influence of more demanding experimental paradigms on rhyme judgment performance is often neglected. Addressing this issue may also shed light on whether rhyme processing…

This study examined the effectiveness of an assessment and intervention study targeting prekindergarten children at risk for reading failure. Across 38 child care sites, 220 children were identified as "at risk" for reading failure due to their performance on a screening measure of early literacy skills and randomly assigned to receive…

As children learn to read, they become sensitive to the patterns that exist in the ways in which their language(s) are represented in print. This skill is known as orthographic processing. We examined the nature of orthographic processing in English and French for children in the first grade of a French immersion program, and the relationship…

The present study compared the effects of different mediation routines provided to kindergartners from families of low socioeconomic status on the students' invented spelling attempts and on their gains obtained on spelling and other early literacy skills (letter naming, sounds of letters, word segmentation, and word decoding). The effects of the…

In the present study we examined the relation between alphabet knowledge fluency (letter names and sounds) and letter writing automaticity, and unique relations of letter writing automaticity and semantic knowledge (i.e., vocabulary) to word reading and spelling over and above code-related skills such as phonological awareness and alphabet…

Does the intensification of what can be called "language-specific speech perception" around reading onset occur as a function of maturation or experience? Preschool 5-year-olds with no school experience, 5-year-olds with 6 months' schooling, 6-year-olds with 6 months' schooling, and 6-year-olds with 18 months' schooling were tested on…

A long history of research has considered the role of iconicity in language and the existence and role of nonarbitrary properties in language and the use of language. Previous studies with Japanese-speaking children, whose language defines a large grammatical class of words with clear sound symbolism, suggest that iconicity properties in Japanese…

There are few emergent literacy assessments available for bilingual children. This study investigated the usefulness of a screening battery of oral language and print-related measures as an assessment tool for bilingual Samoan-English speaking children. A total of 18 children were recruited from three Samoan language immersion kindergartens (Aoga…

The present study investigated whether young Latino dual-language learners' 2-year English reading growth varied over time according to their initial overall oral English ability. We followed 41 Latino children for 2 years. We tested overall oral English at the beginning of the study and administered multiple curriculum-based reading assessments…