In this experiment, we examined whether beginning readers benefit more from grapheme-phoneme decoding (GPD) than from whole-syllable decoding (WSD) instruction in learning to read and write words. Sixty Brazilian Portuguese-speaking first graders (M age = 6 years 1 month) who knew letter names but could not read or write words were randomly…

This study described the growth trajectories of 105 children (n = 55 boys) who had just started primary school in New Zealand (NZ). Children were assessed every fourth school week around 1.5 months after starting school, for five sessions on Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills first sound fluency (FSF), AIMSweb letter sound fluency…

Reading acquisition is based on a set of preliteracy skills that lay the foundation for future reading abilities. Phonological awareness--the ability to identify and manipulate the sound units of oral language--has been reported to play a central role in reading acquisition. However, current evidence is mixed with respect to its universal…

English vowels are phonologically and orthographically more difficult than consonants when learning to map speech to print. We sought to determine if teaching young at-risk readers and spellers to use a visual vowel hand sign system to segment spoken words into their component phonemes contributed to improved grapheme-phoneme correspondence…

An insufficient number of studies investigated the criteria for Arabic letter teaching in schools. Teachers play an integral role in understanding Arabic letters among young children, as it is essential for acquiring reading in the Arabic language early in life. The criteria for teaching letters in a current study include ease of pronunciation,…

Application of psycholinguistic insights initiated a long career researching how children learn to read words. A theory was proposed claiming that spellings of individual words are stored in memory when their graphemes become bonded to phonemes in their pronunciations along with meanings, and this enables readers to read stored words automatically…

At Ysgol Merllyn, a primary school serving the village of Bagillt in North Wales (UK), Tracy Jones, Headteacher, presents data from diagnostic assessment used to determine how well children had retained knowledge of the Extended Code during the disruptions posed by lockdowns and periods of remote learning. [For the complete volume,…

Two groups of freshman students, enrolled in a Vocabulary I and Reading I courses, participated in the study. Before instruction, both groups took a recognition (vocabulary) and a production (oral reading) pre-test. Comparisons of the pre-test scores showed no significant differences between the experimental and control group in decoding skills…

There is a widespread consensus in the research community that reading instruction in English should first focus on teaching letter (grapheme) to sound (phoneme) correspondences rather than adopt meaning-based reading approaches such as whole language instruction. That is, initial reading instruction should emphasize systematic phonics. In this…

Learning the relationships between letters and sounds is a key component of early literacy development and a central aim during the first year of school. Introducing one new letter a week is the most common approach in many countries, but little is known about how the pace of letter instruction contributes to the development of early literacy…

In early Finnish reading instruction, hyphens are used to denote syllable boundaries. However, this practice slows down reading already during the 1st grade. It has been hypothesized that hyphenation forces readers to rely more on phonology than orthography. Since hyphenation highlights the phonology of the word, it may facilitate reading during…

Purpose: This study was designed to assess the efficiency of a French version of "GraphoGame" (GG) against an equally engaging math intervention ("Fiete Math," FM) in a large school sample of children from socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods in grade 1 (N = 921). Method: The intervention was implemented in two…

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether morphological awareness measured before children are taught to read (Kindergarten in Israel) predicts reading accuracy and fluency in the middle of first grade, at the very beginning of the process of learning to read pointed Hebrew -- a highly transparent orthography, and whether this…

Word boundary information is not marked explicitly in Chinese sentences and word ambiguity happens in Chinese texts. This introduces difficulty to parse characters into words when reading Chinese sentences, especially for beginning readers. In an eye-tracking study, we tested whether explicit word boundary information as provided by alternating…

The aim of this study is to examine how a structured intensive training period with a phonological multisensory reading training method, at the end of Grade 1, can develop pupils' ability to connect phonemes with the corresponding graphemes as well as their ability to decode. A total of 38 pupils in Grade 1 from four elementary schools…