Units of Sound (UofS) is a computer-based program designed to help struggling readers with their reading and spelling skills. It is a structured, multisensory program that covers reading and spelling from simple phonics skills through to adult reading levels. It involves a high level of independent work by the student, with small groups of…

Controversy has surrounded the annual National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) since its introduction in 2008. This initiative was designed to provide nationally consistent information on student progress in basic skills in years 3, 5, and 7, replacing the various state-based tests that preceded it. A great deal of criticism has…

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a progressive genetic condition that affects both muscle and brain. Children with DMD are at risk of psycho-social difficulties such as poor academic achievement and behavioural and socio-emotional problems. This article by Janet Hoskin and Angela Fawcett, both from the University of Swansea, describes how 34…

This study aimed to understand the views of prospective teachers with "phonic-based sentence method" through metaphoric images. In this descriptive study, the participants involve the prospective teachers who take reading-writing instruction courses in Primary School Classroom Teaching Program of the Education Faculty of Pamukkale…

Reading is a multifaceted process consisting of many interacting components. A plethora of research is available on reading. Yet, there is inadequate exploration, which ascertains the effects of the interaction of different reading components and how they affect the reading performance of students with autism. This inter-correlational research…

Reading Recovery is an early intervention program used around the world for at-risk readers. Developed at a time when constructivist principles dominated educational philosophy, its efficacy has caused debate and division over the last three decades. This qualitative study employed in-depth interviews and observations to explore 10 Reading…

Various South African and international studies indicate that the preparation of teachers to teach reading is inconsistent across universities worldwide. Teacher preparation programmes lack rigorous research-based findings as the grounding for their programme design. Recommendations of some studies point to the fact that evidence-based research…

Success for All (SfA) is a whole-school approach to improving literacy in primary schools. Teachers receive training in areas including group learning strategies, phonics, and assessment, and are provided with structured daily lesson plans and teaching materials. There is also support for school leadership in areas such as data management, ability…

A quasi-experimental research design was used to investigate the effectiveness of synthetic phonics in the development of early reading skills among struggling young English as a second language (ESL) readers in a rural school. The pretest and posttest, adapted from the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS) for Preschool Students and…

Commercial phonics programmes (e.g. Jolly Phonics and Letterland) are becoming widely used in the early years of school. These programmes claim to use a systematic explicit approach, considered as the preferred method of phonics instruction for teaching alphabetic code-breaking skills in Australia and the UK in the first years of school…

To develop reading acquisition in an effective way, it is necessary to take into account three goals during the process: automatic word recognition, or development of phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, and a desire for reading. This article focuses on promoting phonemic awareness in English as a second language through a program called…

Problem Statement: Utilization of shared reading practice in hearing impaired children's literacy instruction may yield quite beneficial. However an investigation of Turkish literature revealed no studies regarding application of shared reading within elementary settings for hearing or hearing-impaired children. Furthermore international…

This research aims at investigating the influence of two methods implemented in primary reading and writing teaching programs--phonics-based sentence method and decoding (analysis) method--on primary school 5th grade students' reading comprehension achievement. Also, the study considers the relationship between socio-economic status and reading…

Reading in the second language (L2) allows learners access to new vocabulary and opportunities to translate from the L2 to the first language (L1) and vice versa. In this paper, we describe three studies that explored strategies for developing L2 Italian decoding repertoires. Participants were undergraduate students preparing for a short-term…

This study investigated relations between preschool talk exposure and immigrant first graders' second language literacy and oral skills outcomes. Participants in the study were 25 children with Turkish as their first language and Norwegian as their second, attending various multilingual and ethnically diverse preschool classrooms in Norway and…