Reading is an essential skill for daily life and academic success. According to the connectionist model of reading, word recognition involves orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing, as well as the interactions among them. Language skill such as phonological processing, develops earlier than reading acquisition, and thus likely serves…

In today's primary grades, school districts are focused on having students reading on grade level by the end of the school year. To help support this goal, there are a range of strategies school districts use to attempt to meet this goal. These strategies may not promote joy in reading instruction. Primary grade teachers want students to fall in…

Determining later academic achievement, early literacy skills are all of the prerequisite knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary for successful reading and writing during formal education. Early literacy skills consist of several sub-skills including phonology knowledge that determine primary-level reading. The present article is prepared for…

Purpose: This study explored how typically developing 1st grade African American English (AAE) speakers differ from mainstream American English (MAE) speakers in the completion of 2 common phonological awareness tasks (rhyming and phoneme segmentation) when the stimulus items were consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant (CVCC) words and nonwords.…

This article reports a study examining whether foreign language (FL) word learning can be improved with reduction in cognitive load. Cognitive load theory has received substantial supports in various fields of learning but never in FL word learning. Due to the defined poverty in exposure to the FL, hence deprived cognitive pre-requisites for…

This article offers instructional suggestions and strategies based on research and theoretical literature for developing reading fluency through the use of rhyming poetry and other texts beyond the narrative and informational texts that have been traditionally used for reading instruction. Readers' lack of fluency in reading can be a monumental…

We report an empirical comparison of the effectiveness of two theoretically motivated computer-assisted reading interventions (CARI) based on the Finnish GraphoGame CARI: English GraphoGame Rime (GG Rime) and English GraphoGame Phoneme (GG Phoneme). Participants were 6-7-year-old students who had been identified by their teachers as being…

This study evaluated the ability for two rhythmic rhyming programs to raise phonological awareness in the early literacy classroom. Year 1 (5-6-year-olds) from low socioeconomic status schools in Bedfordshire, learned a program of sung or spoken rhythmic rhymes, or acted as controls. The project ran with two independent cohorts (Cohort 1 N = 98,…

The current study examined the use of sublexical clusters in normal and dyslexic readers. We focused primarily on onset consonantal clusters, but the use of rimes and digraphs was also considered. A segmentation paradigm, the separation of two adjacent letters in a word by a nonletter symbol, was used. We hypothesized that the effect of this…

The purpose of this study was to identify relationships that exist between reading ability in 3rd grade and phonological awareness in kindergarten. A second purpose was to identify specific prereading skills that best predict later reading success. This study used a quantitative research design to answer the research questions posed. The…

Two groups of sighted pre-school children were taught to name six braille letters: one group received phoneme instruction and the other grapheme instruction. Ten boys and ten girls (average age 4:5 years) participated. There was a statistically significant advantage for the phoneme group (Experiment 1). In a repeated measures design, 16 sighted…