This study reports the knowledge of text complexity held by preservice teachers prior to coursework. The goal of this research is to determine what strengths and what learning needs preservice teachers have related to text selection with the intention of informing programmatic redesign. In this preliminary component of a design-development study,…

Three novel experiments investigated the effectiveness of color-coded word-families flashcards for facilitating kindergarteners' word recognition skills. Flashcards were constructed with the rime of the word family (vowel and remaining consonant sounds) printed in black ink, indicating that words with this spelling pattern sound the same, and the…

Language-specific features necessitate certain processes and skills in reading. The visually unmarked between-word boundaries in written Chinese render it critical that readers be able to segment words in the continuous texts. It may pose challenges for second language (L2) readers whose first language (L1) is word-spaced. In light of the lack of…

Fluency with skills that operate below the word level (i.e., sublexical), such as phonemic awareness and alphabetic knowledge, may ease the acquisition of decoding skills (Ritchey & Speece, 2006). Measures of sublexical fluency such as phoneme segmentation fluency (PSF), letter naming fluency (LNF), and letter sound fluency (LSF) are widely…

The present study investigated the applicability of word reading, word segmentation, and text reading as diagnostic tools to assess comprehension, detect struggling readers, and inform instruction for low-level Chinese as second language (L2) learners (n = 70). The results showed that the three instruments measured different dimensions of word…

This article offers instructional suggestions and strategies based on research and theoretical literature for developing reading fluency through the use of rhyming poetry and other texts beyond the narrative and informational texts that have been traditionally used for reading instruction. Readers' lack of fluency in reading can be a monumental…

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…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of intervention for developing deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) preschoolers' phonological awareness (PA) skills. Thirty children (mean age 57 months) with aided, bilateral hearing loss (and who primarily communicated using spoken English) were recruited in the year prior to commencing formal schooling. The…

In fall of 2019, the EdWeek Research Center set out to gain a clearer sense of nationwide teacher and teacher education perceptions and practices by sending out two surveys about topics related to early reading instruction, especially as it related to phonics. One survey was taken by 674 K-2 and elementary special education teachers who indicated…

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…

We investigated how letter length, phoneme length, and consonant clusters contribute to the word length effect in 2nd- and 4th-grade children. They read words from three different conditions: In one condition, letter length increased but phoneme length did not due to multiletter graphemes (H"aus"-B"auch"-S"chach"). In…

Siegler's (1996) overlapping waves model of strategy development applied to reading posits that children use multiple strategies to read words from the earliest stage of reading development, that these strategies coexist over a long period of time, and that experience results in gradual change in the strategies children use and the…

The current work examines children's sensitivity to rime unit spelling-sound correspondences within the context of early word reading as a way of assessing word-specific influences on early word-reading strategies. Sixty 6-7-year-olds participated in an experimental reading task that comprised word items that shared either frequent or infrequent…

This study investigates the syllable's role in the normal reading acquisition of French children at three grade levels (1st, 3rd, and 5th), using a modified version of Cole, Magnan, and Grainger's (1999) paradigm. We focused on the effects of syllable frequency and word frequency. The results suggest that from the first to third years of reading…

The authors report a short-term reading intervention study involving 15 children with Down syndrome (DS) who attended mainstream schools. The intervention programme taught children phoneme segmentation and blending skills in the context of learning letter-sounds and working with words in books. The children were taught by their learning support…