Studies by Moats (1995), Mather, Bos, and Babur (2001), and McCutchen, et al (2002) have begun to identify the relationship between teachers' linguistic knowledge and what is known, scientifically, about how literacy is acquired by learners. Findings from these studies support the idea that linguistic knowledge--particularly knowledge of…

In England, Higher Education institutions, together with the schools whose staff they train, are being required to incorporate synthetic phonics as one of the key approaches to the teaching of reading. Yet even if synthetic phonics can be identified as one of the component "skills" of reading, an assumption vigorously contested in this…

Despite the recent attention to text reading fluency, few studies have studied the construct of oral reading rate and accuracy in connected text in a model that simultaneously examines many of the important variables in a multi-leveled fashion with young readers. Using Structural Equation Modeling, this study examined the measurement and…

Writing is often considered secondary to the spoken language, as it is only coded sound-by-sound. But other scholars have demonstrated that writing is similar to "arithmetic": a cognitive structuring, a shift to the meta-level ("for the eye"). "Handwriting" (referred to here as the cursive writing in the sense of…

There is now a strong evidence base from theory and research providing a "template" to inform practice at Wave 2, guiding the design and implementation of time-limited effective early intervention programmes for pupils identified as "at risk" of reading difficulties following initial literacy instruction (Rose, 2009). In…

Great progress has been made in learning how to provide more responsive instructional and behavioral supports to students through efforts in Response to Intervention and Positive Behavior and Intervention Supports. This article presents information and data on a longitudinal study designed to accelerate first graders at-risk for reading…

Targeted to children as young as 3 months old, there is a growing number of baby media products that claim to teach babies to read. This randomized controlled trial was designed to examine this claim by investigating the effects of a best-selling baby media product on reading development. One hundred and seventeen infants, ages 9 to 18 months,…

A central focus in remedial teaching is the generalisation of responses to contexts in which a student has never been explicitly instructed. Remarkably little is known about how and when generalisation occurs. In this article we examine generalisation effects in the context of spelling. Three areas are discussed: generalisation between spelling…

Acquisition of phoneme-grapheme correspondences, a key concept of the alphabetic principle, was examined in young children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) using a semantic association strategy embedded in two interventions, the Children's Early Intervention and Foundations for Literacy. Single-subject design experiments using multiple…

Shared Reading is a powerful teaching technique for teaching beginning reading. Technologies such as Interactive Whiteboards now make Shared Reading much easier to do. Large texts are projected on the whiteboard for Choral reading, and interactive features allow students to learn about letter-sound correspondences, spelling patterns, punctuation,…

Background: Learning to read is very challenging for Hong Kong children who learn English as a second language (ESL), as they must acquire two very different writing systems, beginning at the age of three. Few studies have examined the role of phonological awareness at the subsyllabic levels, oral language proficiency, and L1 tone awareness in L2…

This study sought to determine the effects of explicit phonics instruction and sight word instruction on the letter-sound identification and word reading of 13- to 15-year-old English language learners in the eighth grade who were identified as having intellectual disabilities (ID). Using a randomized single-subject design, four Hispanic students…

Many students with cognitive impairments are not afforded the opportunity to develop their potential as readers. A review of the literature reveals that few researchers have evaluated the effects of phonics instruction on the reading skills of students with cognitive impairments. The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of a…

In a computerized task, an adult with intellectual disabilities learned to construct consonant-vowel-consonant words in the presence of corresponding spoken words. During the initial assessment, the participant demonstrated high accuracy on one word group (containing the vowel-consonant units "it" and "un") but low accuracy on the other group…

Irish has significant State support, but lacks a research base to support the teaching of Irish reading. Current approaches to teaching Irish reading are presented, and outcomes summarised. Issues of consistency and complexity in Irish orthography are discussed in light of an analysis of a corpus of early reader texts, and the formulation of rules…