Reflects on a small-scale survey of nine schools in England where results of the National Curriculum test in spelling were particularly high. Discusses common approaches among the schools, including the teaching of spelling patterns and phonics; the fostering of early independence in writing and reading; and the regular learning of spelling at…

Reading Recovery is part of the Every Child a Reader strategy to enable children to make a good start in reading. Reading Recovery is well known to have impressive effects in the shorter term, but less is known about its long-term effectiveness. The present study followed up at the end of Year 4: 120 comparison children, 73 children who had…

Studied was the development of a variety of grammatical-sensitivity and phonological skills in normally achieving, reading-disabled, arithmetic-disabled, and attention deficit disordered children 7 to 14 years old. (PCB)

A set of four experiments investigates the relationship between phonological coding and reading ability, using a picture-word interference task and a decoding task. Results with regard to both adults and children suggest that while poor readers possess weak decoding skills, good and poor readers show equivalent evidence of direct semantic and…

This pilot study investigated the efficacy of "Phonics Alive 2: The Sound Blender", a computer-based phonological skills training program, delivered with both at-home and at-school components over a 10-week period, as a potential treatment of phonological dyslexia. Participants were 20 dyslexic primary students with an average delay of…

This list of year-by-year statements has been drawn together from England's National Literacy Strategy Framework for Teaching, with a particular focus on reading. The statements also take into account the stages set out in "Progression in Phonics" and the criteria for assessing reading in National Curriculum assessment at Years 2 and 6.…

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)

A study examined effects of phonological awareness training on 191 German kindergartners. Comparisons of children at risk with average and advanced children revealed that training gains were similar for all of these groups. Furthermore, training had comparable long-term effects on reading and spelling in grades 1 and 2 for each group. (Author/CR)

Examines effects of adaptive instruction on results of 456 children in the first year of reading instruction at 23 Dutch primary schools. Teachers in the experimental group show significantly higher adaptive instructional behaviors (optimizing time on task and using direct instruction and phonics methods) than control-group teachers. (59…

In this paper, we describe part of an Australian national research project that aimed to find out how well prepared beginning teachers are to teach literacy. A majority of beginning teachers participating in a series of national surveys and focus group meetings were confident about their personal literacy skills, their conceptual understandings of…

The Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg and Patterson (1996) connectionist model of reading was evaluated at two points early in its training against reading data collected from British children on two occasions during their first year of literacy instruction. First, the network's non-word reading was poor relative to word reading when compared with the…

In a new compact and easy-to-use edition, this book presents a program that provides students with a developmentally appropriate framework in which students become proficient spellers and at the same time develop as readers and writers. The book includes the original spelling instruction program; spelling dictation lists for grades 1 to 3; an…

Results of a study of early reading responses of young children in a Finnish preschool challenge the belief that grapheme-phoneme regularity is a critical factor in beginning reading. (JM)

Developed for use in small groups, this unit of study is aimed at helping children in England who have reached Level 3 in English at Key Stage 2 but who may be making errors in spelling, particularly in the area of vowel choices. In this unit, pupils read realistic texts and investigate the spellings of words they find there. While spelling is the…

Examines early difficulties with phonological coding/phonemic segmentation of German children diagnosed dyslexic after four years in school. States that phonics was used since German exhibits straightforward phoneme-grapheme correspondence; however, most students had difficulty with accurate reading of nonwords and unfamiliar words after seven…