This study examined the learning of teacher candidates taking a language arts course in a special-educator preparation program and that of the second graders they tutored in a supervised field component of the course. Teacher candidates' knowledge of literacy instruction was assessed using five knowledge tasks; children were assessed on several…

Half of a group of 32 reading-disabled second and third graders deficient in phonemic segmentation skills received specific skill training. Trained children were successful at significantly improving their performance on the phonemic segmentation task in contrast to controls who made no improvement. (Author/DB)

The article by Speece (in this issue) underscores the disappointing accuracy results of early screening for reading difficulties and argues that development conceptualized as rate of learning matters. We respond by emphasizing three points. First, the purpose of early screening could be identifying students not at risk so that instructional…

A study examined the effects of overt phonologic impairment on the phonological awareness, verbal working memory, and letter knowledge of 29 children with phonologic impairment and 16 controls (ages 3-6). Children with phonologic impairment performed significantly worse on tasks of verbal working memory, phoneme segmentation, and letter…

Two types of phonological training of children with reading disabilities were compared. Children trained in speech discrimination, letter-sound correspondence, and phonemic awareness (SP/LPA) and children trained only in letter-sound correspondence and phonemic awareness (n=35) improved in phonemic awareness, but only the SP/LPA group scored…

A study of 16 first-grade Greek children with literacy difficulties and 16 controls found that the time needed to process a written item was the crucial index of difficulty in literacy acquisition and that phonemic awareness and speech rate tasks were predictors of learning to read and spell Greek words. (Author/CR)

Forty-eight first-grade children with reading difficulties were taught 48 words using a whole-word method, a subword method for making connections between each color-coded spelling unit and its corresponding phonemes, or a combined whole-word and subword method. The subword method showed a reliable advantage on a test of real word reading.…

Comparison of 80 beginning first graders, half receiving phonics instruction and half receiving whole word instruction, found, for both groups, those above grade level in reading excelled in phonological recoding and application of grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules while those below grade level applied visual-orthographic knowledge more than…

A study investigated the role of speed of processing, rapid naming, and phonological awareness in reading achievement of 279 third-graders. Poor readers were proportionally slower than good readers across response time measures and on the rapid object-naming task. Processing speed, IQ, and phonological awareness explained variance in reading…

A study involving 1,123 children investigated the relationship between naming speed and phonological awareness skills and the implications for the classification of children at risk of reading disability. Results found a positive correlation between naming speed and phonological awareness and indicate this relationship will affect any comparison…

Ninety-one Finnish preschoolers were assessed prior to receiving formal reading instruction. Verbal and nonverbal measures were used as predictors for the time of instruction required to accurately decode pseudowords. Phonological awareness differentiated precocious decoders from early decoders and ordinary decoders. Late decoders differed from…

One hundred kindergarten children completed a phoneme segmentation test, an invented spelling test, and two tests of visual-motor ability. Scores on both tests of phoneme awareness predicted between 30% and 40% of variance in reading ability a year later, while visual-motor scores bore a less substantial relationship to future reading ability.…

A study investigated letter orientation confusions (reversals) in the reading and writing of 10 children with reading disabilities and 10 typical readers (age 10). Individuals with reading disability made more orientation confusions. Orientation errors were more frequent for reversible than for nonreversible items in tasks involving long-term…

Two cohorts of preschool children (n=238) were followed to determine whether tests of phonological awareness, orthographic processing, and serial-naming speed, added to a preschool battery, would improve prediction of reading. The major predictors of first-grade reading and spelling were preschool letter-naming and sentence memory for both…

The effectiveness of an explicit, systematic reading intervention for first-grade students whose home language was Spanish and who were at risk for reading difficulties was examined. Participants were 69 students in 20 classrooms in 7 schools from 3 districts who initially did not pass the screening in Spanish and were randomly assigned within…