Background: Many South African children attend African language medium of instruction (MOI) schools, learn English as an additional language and switch to English MOI three years later. There is still much to be researched about how a child's first and second language literacy develops over time in South Africa. Aim: This study aims to outline the…

Background: A large amount of evidence highlights the obvious inequalities in literacy results of South African learners. Despite this, a sound understanding of how learners approach the task of reading in the African languages is lacking. Aim: This article examines the role of the syllable, phoneme and morpheme in reading in transparent,…

The emerging reading and spelling abilities of 24 deaf and 23 hearing beginning readers were followed over 2 years. The deaf children varied in their language backgrounds and preferred mode of communication. All children were given a range of literacy, cognitive and language-based tasks every 12 months. Deaf and hearing children made similar…

Knowledge of letter-sound correspondences underpins successful reading acquisition, and yet little is known about how young children acquire this knowledge and what prior information they bring to the learning process. In this study, we used an experimental training design to examine whether either prior letter awareness or prior phonemic…

To test how phonemic awareness influences reading, two experiments were conducted in the northwestern part of England in which twenty pairs of children possessing phonemic awareness (pa+) and lacking phonemic awareness (pa-) and matched for reading and chronological age were compared. In the first experiment, the subjects' ability to detect…

Elaborates the view that phonological recoding, or print-to-sound translation, is a self-teaching mechanism enabling learners to acquire the orthographic representations necessary for visual word recognition. Discusses developmental properties of phonological recoding, reviews evidence on the importance of cognitive abilities underlying the…

Two studies investigated whether knowledge of specific letter-sound correspondences is a necessary precursor of children's ability to isolate phonemes in speech. In both studies, Czech and English children reliably isolated phonemes for which they did not know the corresponding letter. These data refute the idea that phoneme manipulation ability…

Eleven preschoolers and 19 kindergartners were tested for alphabet knowledge, metalinguistic awareness, ability to spell 10 words, and ability to read either their own or the conventional spellings of those 10 words. Findings are presented. (Author/MT)

Background: It is widely recognized that effective interventions for poor reading involve training in phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge, linked in the context of reading books. From the applied perspective, it is important to gather data on the effectiveness of different forms of implementation of literacy support within this framework.…

Language analysis tasks (segmentation and rhyming) and rapid automatized naming tasks (objects, colors, and letters) were found to tap different linguistics-processing components in both kindergarteners and first graders. Children who could analyze letter names were more likely to be among the better readers at the end of first grade. (Author/BS)

First-grade children's reading, writing, and spelling competencies in 2 different instructional contexts for teaching phonics were examined. Reading, writing, and spelling abilities were measured at the beginning, middle, and end of 1st grade. Children were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 treatments designed to teach grapheme-phoneme correspondences,…

This study investigated the relationship between letter-sound ability and general reading ability in Israeli Hebrew and explored the value of letter-sound ability as a predictor of later reading success. The subjects were 130 children in primary classes in two Israeli public schools differentiated by socioeconomic status (SES). Stimuli were 31…

Develomental patterns in the reading and aural skills of 45 preschool, kindergarten, and first grade children, were assessed. Children with increasing reading abilities were progressively more successful in their ability to segment words in both aural and visual contexts. (FG)

This study examined the interrelations of speech skills and letter knowledge to the phonological awareness and early reading skills of 99 preschool children. Findings indicated that phoneme awareness, but not rhyme awareness, correlated with early reading measures and that phoneme manipulation was closely associated with letter knowledge and with…

A sample of 270 first, second, and third graders participated in this study of the pronounceability of the 119 phonograms identified in the Glass Analysis for Perceptual Conditioning Program for poor decoders. Each subject was asked to pronounce each of the phonograms. Subjects were cross-classified by grade level, sex, and reading ability as…