This paper explores the extent to which student teachers, in their final year of a 3-year undergraduate programme teach phonics as part of a holistic reading programme linked to reading for meaning and for pleasure. It reports the results of surveys, lesson observations and interviews with a sample of students studying at one university in the…

The debates about what are the most effective ways to teach young children to learn to read have been described as 'the reading wars'. In 2022 the research published in a paper by Wyse and Bradbury (2022) stimulated widespread attention including in the media. Wyse and Bradbury concluded on the basis of four major research analyses that although…

Students have the right to learn to read as part of their free, appropriate, public education. Yet current assessment data reveal that a substantial number of students in American public-schools are not able to read at a proficient level. If we desire improved student outcomes in reading, we must work for improved instruction in foundational…

The present study investigated the compensatory role of verbal learning and consolidation in reading and spelling of children with (N = 54) and without dyslexia (N = 36) and the role of verbal learning (learning new verbal information) and consolidation (remember the learned information over time) on the response to a phonics through spelling…

In July 2023, Governor DeWine and the General Assembly enacted bold literacy reforms via his budget plan (House Bill 33) that require Ohio elementary schools to follow the Science of Reading starting in 2024-25. This approach to reading instruction emphasizes phonics to help students "decode" words, as well as knowledge- and…

This qualitative phenomenological dissertation in practice explored teacher perspectives of the Texas Reading Academies required by the state of Texas. Students at an elementary school in Texas were performing below grade level expectations in reading. Although teachers were required to complete the Texas Reading Academies, based on the data…

This study explored the effects of literacy-rich sociodramatic guided play on kindergarten student literacy performance and behavior. Kindergarten students of varying socioeconomic status attending two elementary schools in the same school district participated in this repeated measures, counterbalanced design study. Students received the mandated…

A comparison was made of 10-year-old boys and girls who had learnt to read by analytic or synthetic phonics methods as part of their early literacy programmes. The boys taught by the synthetic phonics method had better word reading than the girls in their classes, and their spelling and reading comprehension was as good. In contrast, with analytic…

In this study we examined the effectiveness of a reading intervention targeting a group of 24 struggling readers in ten primary schools in Ireland. The intervention consisted of two components; component one consisted of 15-20 minutes delivery of the Toe-by-Toe programme (a well established systematic synthetic phonics programme) and the second…

Early reading abilities are widely considered to derive in part from statistical learning of regularities between letters and sounds. Although there is substantial evidence from laboratory work to support this, how it occurs in the classroom setting has not been extensively explored; there are few investigations of how statistics among letters and…

This quantitative study examined the data collected from the students who participated in a reading intervention and compared their growth rate after one year of implementation to their growth rate prior to the intervention. The study was conducted in an affluent school corporation located in Indiana. The study evaluated the effectiveness of this…

A novel intervention was developed to teach reading and spelling literacy to 5 to 7 year-old students using explicit instruction of morphology, etymology, phonology, and form rules. We examined the effects of the intervention compared to a phonics-based condition using a cross-over design with a baseline measure. One hundred and twenty children…

In teaching reading, educators strive to find the balance between a code-emphasis approach and a meaning-oriented literacy approach. However, little is known about how different approaches to literacy can benefit bilingual children's early reading acquisition. To investigate the novel hypothesis that children's age of first bilingual exposure can…

Fluency is known as the bridge between phonics and comprehension. Teachers of reading provide high-quality instruction in phonics and decoding strategies, usually in a small-group format, but may be unsure how to insert fluency instruction into the small-group lesson. This article presents key concepts in fluency instruction and a description of…

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…