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…

Purpose: Children progress from making grapheme-phoneme connections to making grapho-syllabic connections before whole-word connections during reading development (Ehri, 2005a). More is known about the development of grapheme--phoneme connections than is known about grapho-syllabic connections. Therefore, we explored the trajectory of syllable use…

Many children living in linguistically diverse low- and middle-income countries learn to read and write in multiple languages. Recent research provides implications for effective reading instruction with multilingual learners (e.g., Hall et al. in New Dir Child Adolesc Dev 166:145-189, 2019). However, there is limited empirical evidence on…

This longitudinal study investigated the predictors of word reading in English and French for 69 children in early total French immersion from first through third grade. The influence of phonological awareness, orthographic processing, and vocabulary in English and French on the achievement and growth of word reading in the 2 languages were…

This qualitative study used a sociocultural lens to examine how two bilingual Hispanic first-grade girls demonstrated bilingual reading practices (i.e., heteroglossia and translanguaging) as they discussed and read texts in Spanish and English. One girl predominantly received school reading instruction in Spanish, while the other received school…

Research Findings: The current study reports on the results of a longitudinal investigation of the language and early literacy development of a sample of dual-language learners (DLLs) and monolingual English speakers from low-income families who received an Early Reading First intervention during their Head Start preschool year. A total of 62…

The effectiveness of using American Sign Language (ASL) handshape stories to teach word recognition in whole stories using a descriptive case study approach was explored. Four profoundly deaf children ages 7 to 8, enrolled in a self-contained deaf education classroom in a public school in the south participated in the story time five-week…

An enhanced replication of an original quasi-experiment (Tom Bellomo, 2009b) was conducted to quantify the extent of long term retention of word parts and vocabulary. Such were introduced as part of a vocabulary acquisition strategy in a developmental reading course at one southeast four-year college. Aside from incorporating changes to the test…

There is currently no fixed programme for sequencing of formal reading instruction in Irish-medium schools and practices vary considerably. This study compared the development of reading skills in the Irish and English languages of children from varying linguistic backgrounds and schooling experiences. Three age groups of children (N = 254)…

The current study investigates how beginner readers learn to read Setswana and English, and whether there is cross-language transference of skills between these two languages. Letter knowledge, phoneme awareness and reading of words and pseudowords in both Setswana and English were assessed in 36 Grade 2 children. A complex pattern emerged.…

This paper exposes how function words and their prosodic features play a part in learning and teaching to read in the early years. It sketches the place that function words have in the grammar of English and describes their phonological features, especially their weak stress and its role in the prosodic quality of sentences. It considers the ways…

Arguing that following some simple concepts can drastically reduce the rate of illiteracy, this booklet maintains that the extent of the literacy problem is teacher-induced and can be reversed by the systematic teaching of the phonics of the English language. The booklet argues that students in grades 1-3 are just beginning to learn how to read…

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…

Intended to help students overcome their reading and spelling difficulties, this booklet describes teaching reading and spelling using the notion of five types of English words and presents extensive word lists to teach each type of word. The five types of words discussed in the booklet are "simple" (words that follow regular phonic…

This study compared the early reading development of five-year-old children who were learning to read either English (an opaque orthography) or Welsh (a shallow orthography). The children were being educated in Welsh and English-speaking primary schools in Wales during their first year of formal reading instruction. Teaching methods in both…