In lexical development, the specificity of phonological representations is important. The ability to build phonologically specific lexical representations predicts the number of words a child knows (vocabulary breadth), but it is not clear if it also fosters how well words are known (vocabulary depth). Sixty-six children were studied in…

Purpose: Identifying appropriate targets for vocabulary instruction and determining the optimal sequence for instruction continue to be a challenge. The purpose of this study is to investigate how previously studied lexical characteristics collectively influence children's word learning. Method: A secondary data analysis was conducted using the…

Purpose: Identifying appropriate targets for vocabulary instruction and determining the optimal sequence for instruction continue to be a challenge. The purpose of this study is to investigate how previously studied lexical characteristics collectively influence children's word learning. Method: A secondary data analysis was conducted using the…

This qualitative case study examined the contribution a year-long professional development in the science of reading had on 10 first-grade teachers' knowledge of how reading develops and their instructional practices. Data for this research study was collected through a longitudinal interview process, from pre- and post-knowledge inventory…

Learning to read begins at home through everyday parent-child interactions, long before children attend school. Parents' continuing support of literacy development throughout elementary school positively affects their children's reading ability. Many recent efforts to motivate parents to be involved in their child's literacy development involve…

This article reports a study examining whether foreign language (FL) word learning can be improved with reduction in cognitive load. Cognitive load theory has received substantial supports in various fields of learning but never in FL word learning. Due to the defined poverty in exposure to the FL, hence deprived cognitive pre-requisites for…

This study examined the orthographic transparency of Arabic by investigating the contribution of phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary, and Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) to reading vowelized and unvowelized words. The results from first and second grade children showed that PA contribution was similar in the vowelized and unvowelized…

The aim of this study was to examine the influence of phonotactic probability (PP) and neighbourhood density (ND) on pseudoword learning in 17 Dutch-speaking typically developing children (mean age 7;2). They were familiarized with 16 one-syllable pseudowords varying in PP (high vs low) and ND (high vs low) via a storytelling procedure. The…

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…

The current intervention study investigated the sustained effectiveness of phonological awareness training on the reading development of 16 children in French immersion who were identified as at-risk readers based on grade 1 English measures. The intervention program provided children from three cohorts with supplemental reading in small groups on…

Grounded in a strong evidence base, this indispensable text and practitioner guide has given thousands of teachers tools to support the literacy growth of beginning and struggling readers in grades K-2. The interactive strategies approach (ISA) is organized around core instructional goals related to enhancing word learning and comprehension of…

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to examine the relations between speech sound accuracy, vocabulary, and phonological awareness, and (2) to examine the effect of word properties of neighborhood density and phonotactic probability on word learning within a storybook context, for children with and without speech sound inaccuracies. Fifty…

The aim of this study was to investigate whether bilingually raised children in the Netherlands, who receive literacy instruction in their second language only, show an advantage on Dutch phoneme-awareness tasks compared with monolingual Dutch-speaking children. Language performance of a group of 47 immigrant first-grade children with various…

This study attempted to provide a systematic framework for phonics instruction for beginning readers in literature-based classrooms based on relative frequency of phoneme-grapheme occurrences found in three distinct corpora. The first corpus contained an academic word list. The second corpus contained the running text from 363 books identified as…

Components of first-grade intervention programs that addressed oral language and listening comprehension instruction within an intensive literacy intervention for native Spanish-speaking students struggling with reading difficulties are described. Findings for the intervention are based on 4 large-scale experimental studies (published elsewhere)…