Purpose: Two types of orthographic knowledge were examined: i) knowledge of permissible letter combinations (general orthographic knowledge) and ii) knowledge of whole words (word-specific orthographic knowledge), to gain further insights into the relationship of general and word-specific orthographic knowledge with literacy skills. Method:…

It is widely accepted that general intelligence and phonological awareness contribute to children's acquisition of reading and spelling skills. A further candidate in this regard is orthographic knowledge (i.e., the knowledge about permissible letter patterns). It consists of two components, word-specific (i.e., the knowledge of the spelling of…

Deficits in reading fluency and in spelling can dissociate during development, resulting in groups with reading deficit only (RD), spelling deficit only (SD) and combined reading and spelling deficit (RSD). The current study investigated the one-to-two-year longitudinal stability of these subgroups in 167 German-speaking children. Reading fluency…

The growing number of children in primary schools in Germany who have German as their second language (L2) has raised questions about the fairness of performance assessment. Fair tests are a prerequisite for distinguishing between L2 learning delay and a specific learning disability. We evaluated five commonly used reading and spelling tests for…

Small-group interventions allow for tailored instruction for students with learning difficulties. A crucial first step is the accurate identification of students who need such an intervention. This study investigated how teachers decide whether their students need a remedial reading intervention. To this end, 64 teachers of 697 third-grade…

Background: Educational processes and outcomes are influenced by a multitude of factors, including individual and contextual characteristics. Recently, studies have demonstrated that student and context characteristics may produce unique and cumulative effects on educational outcomes. Aims: The study aimed to investigate (1) the relative…

An auditory lexical decision experiment was conducted to find out whether sound-to-spelling consistency has an impact on German spoken word processing, and whether such an impact is different at different stages of reading development. Four groups of readers (school children in the second, third and fifth grades, and university students)…

Children with literacy difficulties often suffer from a variety of co-occurring externalizing and internalizing difficulties, as well as comorbid ADHD. Therefore, these externalizing and internalizing problems might be more related to comorbid ADHD, rather than being a correlate of literacy difficulties per se. In the present study, we…

Two studies examined short- and long-term effects of phonological awareness training on reading and spelling of German kindergartners. Found no long-term effects on reading and spelling skills beyond first year of elementary school. Determined that training affected phonological awareness skills but not phonological processing, letter knowledge,…

Phonological awareness is believed to play a major role in the auditory contribution to spelling skills. The previous paper reports low-level auditory deficits in five different subdomains in 33-70% of the dyslexics. The first study of this paper reports the results of an attempt to improve low-level auditory skills by systematic daily practice of…

Within alphabetic languages, spelling-to-sound consistency can differ dramatically. For example, English and German are very similar in their phonological and orthographic structure but not in their consistency. In English the letter "a" is pronounced differently in the words "bank," "ball," and "park,"…

This monograph offers papers presented at the 1998 annual meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics. After an introduction entitled "The Pluralisation of Literacy" (Teresa O'Brien), the papers are: (1) "National Literacy Strategies: A Debate" (Jill Bourne, Gunther Kress, Brian Street, and Alison Sealey); (2)…