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…

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…

Concept of word is a pivotal developmental insight that is reflected when preliterate learners are able to repeat a line of print and accurately point to the words while saying them (finger-point reading) and relocate a specific word within that line (word finding). Several studies have shown that letter knowledge, phonemic skills, one-to-one…

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…

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…

Children with little or no functional speech are at risk for literacy acquisition. Assessment of early literacy skills is particularly challenging among this population due to the need for children to provide a spoken response to tasks. This study explored the effects of adapted response modes on measures of phonological sensitivity. Assessment…

This study examined the relationships between concept of word development and other early literacy measures (rhyme awareness, beginning sound awareness, alphabet knowledge, letter sound knowledge, spelling, and word recognition in isolation) using data from the PALS-K. Supporting previous research by using a much larger data set than had been used…

This qualitative study investigates the invented spellings of young EFL writers in terms of the relationship between phonological awareness and internalized grapheme-phoneme principles. Two kindergarteners and two first graders participated in weekly English writing tasks for 14 months. Results obtained from protocols of the students' free writing…

Great progress has been made in learning how to provide more responsive instructional and behavioral supports to students through efforts in Response to Intervention and Positive Behavior and Intervention Supports. This article presents information and data on a longitudinal study designed to accelerate first graders at-risk for reading…

The knowledge that reading and phonological awareness are mainly reciprocally related has hardly influenced the status of a phonological awareness deficit as the main cause of a reading deficit in dyslexia. Because direct proofs for this theory are still lacking we investigated children at familial risk for dyslexia in kindergarten and first…