Although connectionist models provide a framework explaining how the decoding and encoding abilities work reciprocally to enhance reading and spelling ability, encoding instruction in today's schools is not a priority. Although a limited amount of high-quality experimental or control studies to date (N = 11) give empirical support to using direct,…

This study examines the literacy outcomes for children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds who had received specific whole-class phonological awareness (PA) and language intervention in preschool. The participants were 57 children who had been involved in the original intervention study. Their PA skills, letter-sound knowledge, real word and…

This resource is a compilation of three documents that support the teaching of spelling in today's schools: a discussion of "Why Spelling Instruction Matters", a checklist for evaluating a spelling program, and tables of Common Core State Standards that are linked to spelling instruction. "Why Spelling Instruction Matters"…

The ability to identify stop consonants from brief onset spectra was compared between a group of Chinese children with phonological dyslexia (the PD group, with a mean age of 10 years 4 months) and a group of chronological age-matched control children. The linguistic context, which included vowels and speakers, and durations of stop onset spectra…

The purpose of this study was to determine if event-related potential (ERP) data collected during three reading-related tasks (Letter Sound Matching, Nonword Rhyming, and Nonword Reading) could be used to predict short-term reading growth on a curriculum-based measure of word identification fluency over 19 weeks in a sample of 29 first-grade…

According to the Lexical Restructuring Model (Metsala & Walley, 1998), children move from holistic representations of words, to syllabic representations, and finally to phonemic representations through a restructuring process driven by their developing lexical base. In contrast, the psycholinguistic grain size theory put forth by Ziegler and…

Knowledge of letter-sound correspondences underpins successful reading acquisition, and yet little is known about how young children acquire this knowledge and what prior information they bring to the learning process. In this study, we used an experimental training design to examine whether either prior letter awareness or prior phonemic…

A sample of 141 Canadian children in grades 3 through 6 wrote to dictation 24 short sentences sampling 90 lexical items representing 10 inflectional morphological categories to study their relation to the written spelling of 40 sight words. The children were encouraged in 3, 30-minute teaching sessions to use multiple strategies of retrieval,…

In this 2-experiment study, experimental analyses of phoneme blending and segmenting skills were conducted with four-first grade students. Intraindividual analyses were conducted to identify the effects of classroom-based instruction on blending phonemes in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, the effects of an individualized intervention for the…

While several models of adult writing have been proposed and studied, the development of writing skills in young children has only recently garnered attention. Using measures of fine-motor, language, working memory, and attention/executive functions, the current study explored motor and cognitive skills that may contribute to writing skill in…

A fiercely contested debate in teaching reading concerns the respective roles and merits of reading schemes and real books. Underpinning the controversy are different philosophies and beliefs about how children learn to read. However, to some extent debates have largely been rhetoric-driven, rather than research-driven. This article provides a…

The visual attention (VA) span deficit hypothesis was found successfully to account for variability in developmental dyslexia (Bosse, Tainturier & Valdois, 2007). We conducted a cross-sectional study on 417 typically developing children from first, third and fifth grades examining the role of VA span on the development of reading skills. A battery…

In this age of accountability and assessment, classroom teachers need to be encouraged to become action researchers. Action research helps them look at a challenge in the classroom in depth and adjust the curriculum, their teaching methods, or both when they find that current practices are not meeting the needs of some or all students. If…

In orthographies studied to date, children learning to spell tend to omit one consonant of a cluster--for initial clusters, the second consonant, and for medial nasal clusters, the nasal. Explanations have included a special status for the initial consonant of a word, and the fact that in English nasal clusters are not true clusters but consist of…

Letter-name identification has been widely used as part of early screening to identify children who might be at risk for future word reading difficulty. The goal of the present study was to examine whether a reduced set of letters could have similar diagnostic accuracy rather than a full set (i.e., 26 letters) when used as a screen. First, we…