This single subject experimental design study used an adapted alternating treatment design to examine the effects of a synthetic phonics intervention and an analytic phonics intervention on oral reading accuracy, oral reading rate, and letter-sound correspondences among first grade students. Students who were reading at least two levels below…

A hallmark of skilled reading is recognizing written words automatically from memory by sight. How beginning readers attain this skill is explained. They must acquire foundational knowledge, including phonemic segmentation, grapheme-phoneme knowledge, decoding, and spelling skills. When these skills are applied, spellings of words become bonded to…

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…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of an 18-day summer tutoring program in which graduate student tutors delivered 15 minutes of differentiated reading instruction (DRI) and a 30-minute interactive read-aloud (IRA) lesson each day. Students in grades K-5 (N = 179) attending a summer program at one urban elementary school…

Structured Literacy (SL) approaches are often recommended for students with dyslexia and other poor decoders (e.g., International Dyslexia Association, 2017). Examples of SL approaches include the Wilson Reading System (Wilson, 1988), Orton-Gillingham (Gillingham & Stillman, 2014), the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program (Lindamood &…

Recent efforts to motivate parents' involvement in their child's literacy development involve informing parents about how to incorporate literacy development into daily routines. Teacher leadership and communication are critical--the more teachers encourage and assist parents and caregivers in supporting their child's literacy development, the…

Quantifying the decoding difficulty (i.e., 'decodability') of text is important for accurately matching young readers to appropriate text and scaffolding reading development. Since no easily accessible, quantitative, word-level metric of decodability exists, we developed a decoding measure (DM) that can be calculated via a web-based scoring…

This study examined the incidence of reading impairments, the reading profiles, and the outcomes of a reading intervention for youth involved in a comprehensive crime prevention program. Rates of reading impairments were between 55% and 61%. Reading profiles for participants with reading comprehension impairments showed deficits in phonological…

There is some evidence that reading and spelling are complementary processes. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which contextualized spelling (i.e., spelling activities within the context of reading instruction) is used to support reading in first-grade core reading programs. Analysis of 75 lessons across five programs…

Learning to read begins at home through everyday parent-child interactions, long before children attend school. Parents' continuing support of literacy development throughout elementary school positively affects their children's reading ability. Many recent efforts to motivate parents to be involved in their child's literacy development involve…

Research has indicated that reading aloud to young students can enhance their foundational reading skills and their reading motivation, but such research has been lacking in African contexts. In this study, we assessed the efficacy of story read-aloud lessons in improving students' foundational reading skills in Nigeria. The experiment took place…

The Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) is used to evaluate studies and monitor projects that address reading skills in low- and middle-income countries. Results are often described solely in terms of a passage-reading subtask, thereby overlooking progress in related skills. Using archival data of cohort samples from Uganda at two time points in…

This is a companion to the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) practice guide, "Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade" (ED566956). This guide is organized according to the four recommendations and how-to steps from the WWC practice guide. The activities follow the typical developmental…

This intervention study investigated the growth of letter sound reading and growth of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) word decoding abilities for a representative sample of 41 US children in preschool settings. Specifically, the study evaluated the effectiveness of a 3-step letter-sound teaching intervention in teaching preschool children to…

The study presents a reading intervention for children having a variety of reading deficits. For this study it was found that most of the children had not responded positively to phonics instruction. Based on brain imaging studies, it has been shown that there are positive changes in the left brains of readers with dyslexia who receive phonemic…