Pre-service teachers (PSTs) need sound Knowledge About Language (KAL), both for their own professional communication and for their teaching practice. In the longer term, enhanced KAL will benefit our graduates in their implementation of the Australian Curriculum. This paper reports on work with First Year PSTs at one Australian university. We…

The study presents a reading intervention for children having a variety of reading deficits. For this study it was found that most of the children had not responded positively to phonics instruction. Based on brain imaging studies, it has been shown that there are positive changes in the left brains of readers with dyslexia who receive phonemic…

Abracadabra (ABRA) is a 20-week online literacy program composed of phonic fluency and comprehension activities based around a series of age-appropriate texts. Four 15-minute sessions per week are delivered by a teaching assistant (TA) to groups of three to five pupils. This report summarizes the findings of a randomized controlled trial assessing…

Reading Recovery is part of the Every Child a Reader strategy to enable children to make a good start in reading. Reading Recovery is well known to have impressive effects in the shorter term, but less is known about its long-term effectiveness. The present study followed up at the end of Year 4: 120 comparison children, 73 children who had…

The research discussed in this report is a continuation of an effort to develop a set of diagnostic subtests in phonics and structure with empirically determined mastery levels. The complete test will assess the word identification skills of elementary school children. Revisions made in the test battery following administration of the Phonics and…

Reviews investigation of word recognition and identification ability of learning disabled and average students. Disabled students' abilities did not differ from those of average students with matched reading level and IQ, but they made substantially more errors than average students matched by chronological age and IQ. (HTH)

This document describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of a program aimed at increasing the level of achievement of first-grade students at the Edmund W. Flynn Model Elementary School. The diagnostic and placement procedure developed allowed for student placement in programs aimed at individual strength while providing remediation…