Reading motivation is an important factor that can predict reading performance in elementary school. The present study aimed to investigate whether reading motivation could mediate the relationship between reading skills at the beginning of school and reading performance in the middle of elementary school. Longitudinal data from 979 students (52%…

In Denmark there is an ongoing trend towards a more ambitious literacy instruction in the first school year (Kindergarten). This calls for a clarification of present-day reading levels, and for a profile of the students who become readers while attending the semi-formal literacy program. The present study examined the extent to which a group of…

Some children come to school with a smaller vocabulary than their peers. If children do not have knowledge of the meaning of the words they read in texts, they will fail to comprehend those texts and struggle to keep up with their peers. This is critical because the link between vocabulary and comprehension is very clear (Sticht et al., 1974, as…

In this century, the value of information has become more significant; reflecting this change, focus has shifted to preparing pupils for the functional use of reading. Therefore, the latest international assessments of reading literacy are set up to address this kind of knowledge. Significant numbers of individuals are performing below the minimum…

The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) and reading skills in distinguishing gifted students from their non-gifted peers. A total of 260 third grade students participated in the study. Of these students, 144 were gifted, while the others were not. As the data collection tools, personal information…

School closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic uncovered the overriding need to create engaging online learning environments to facilitate students' learning. This paper focuses on the online evaluation of Own-Voice Intensive Phonics (OVIP) approach, a computer-assisted instruction programme used during the COVID restrictions to help 15 pupils aged…

Background: In opaque orthographies, such as English, children with low reading skills tend to rely more on semantic information due to their inadequate acquisition of sub-lexical knowledge. This tendency has also been reported for kanji, a non-alphabetic and opaque Japanese orthography. However, previous studies on this phenomenon have had…

This study investigated Saudi Arabian elementary school teachers' knowledge of strategies to teach reading components to hard of hearing students. The study focused on four of the five reading components the National Reading Panel (NPR, 2000) identified: phonemic awareness; phonics; vocabulary; and reading comprehension, and explored the relation…

The capacities of detecting visual regularities were tested among twenty typical (age 11.1 ± 0.32), and twenty poor (age 11.03 ± 0.28) native-Arab readers. Two stages were implemented, passive exposure to visual regularities and forced decision task. In the first stage, the participants were passively presented with four shapes; each shape was…

Although the link between developmental dyslexia and visual-spatial deficit has been recurrently highlighted, the relationship between visual-spatial abilities and reading performance is still a controversial issue, considering the orthographic variability of the language being learned. This study aimed to examine whether visuo-spatial abilities…

Dialogic reading (DR) is an interactive reading approach that enhances the language development of children. This study aims to extend DR to the shared reading context involving children with attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and their older siblings and to examine the effects of DR with parents/siblings on the language development…

This study analyzes the relationship between phonemic proficiency and orthographic learning in first and second-grade students. It is established in the empirical literature that phonemic skills play a crucial role in word-level reading. What is not thoroughly understood is why some children learn and remember words more efficiently than others.…

The student-teacher relationship plays an important role in the development of academic and social skills in early elementary (Torres, Domitrovich, & Bierman, 2015; Vitaro, Boivin, Brendgen, Girard, & Dionne, 2012; etc.). Although the importance of the student-teacher relationship is well-established, the importance for special education…

Empirical research has shown that poor comprehenders use reading strategies less frequently than good comprehenders. Moreover, poor comprehenders tend to use simple strategies (e.g. slowing down reading when the text is hard to understand) instead of using more complex strategies (e.g. choosing between main and trivial information). The present…

This article asserts that a carefully administered informal reading inventory (IRI) provides important information on low-achieving readers that is "not" provided by an end-of-grade standardized reading test. Using case studies of students' IRI performance, we address the concept of instructional level and the necessity of teaching low…