Early reading intervention is crucial to ensure all students develop strong foundational literacy skills for academic and lifelong success. This Spotlight will help readers investigate the benefits of tutoring on early reading skills; identify how to build students' reading stamina; gain insights into knowledge-building curricula; review the…

Direct Instruction (DI), commercially marketed by McGraw-Hill as Reading Mastery and Corrective Reading, is a bundle of highly scripted reading programs emphasizing phonics and phonemic awareness. This assessment considers 40 recently published studies on DI in order to consider the program's aims and efficacy as a means of teaching reading. Our…

The twin objectives of the series Psychological Perspectives on Contemporary Educational Issues are: (1) to identify issues in education that are relevant to professional educators and researchers; and (2) to address those issues from research and theory in educational psychology, psychology, and related disciplines. The present volume, consisting…

As computers become an increasingly ubiquitous part of young children's lives there is a need to examine how best to harness digital technologies to promote learning in early childhood education contexts. The development of emergent literacy skills is 1 domain for which numerous software programs are available for young learners. In this study, we…

An analysis of large and influential published reviews of research pertaining to the reading acquisition of young struggling readers in the early years of schooling was undertaken. The reviews were selected on the basis that they either had been commissioned by federal governments or had been conducted by reputable research institutions and had…

Building crucial bridges between theory, research, and practice, this volume brings together leading authorities on the literacy development of young children. The "Handbook" examines the full range of factors that shape learning in and out of the classroom, from basic developmental processes to family and sociocultural contexts,…

The purpose of this study was to examine a model of early reading acquisition that hinged on a phenomenon seldom explored in beginning reading research: a child's concept of word in text. Previous research in early literacy acquisition has centered on the role phonological awareness--the ability to consciously attend to and manipulate the sound…

Self-report is a time- and cost-efficient screening measure that has the potential to be useful as a stand-alone means of recruiting adults for participation in reading research. We report on a sample of university students (N=46) recruited using the Adult Reading History Questionnaire-Revised, half of whom reported early difficulty with reading…

Discusses research and instances of children learning to read and or write in the home without formal instruction, tracing the development of such natural literacy. Argues that literacy is primarily a social process, involving both teaching and learning. (HTH)

Two distinguishing characteristics of early readers are superior sound blending and visual memory skills. (RB)

Describes the reading skills of postkindergarten precocious readers. Finds no meaningful weaknesses in their average skill pattern; their strengths mirrored weakness identified among disabled readers; they were especially rapid text readers; they drew on especially strong phonological analysis skills as well as orthographic processes; but average…

Considers the nature of joint (parent-child) pre-school activities in the home, and their potential to contribute to the development of early reading skills. Assesses children on various aspects of phonological awareness, and their receptive vocabulary and short-term memory. Finds that children who engaged in a variety of pre-school, parent-child…

Concludes that preschool children know that print conveys information, yet frequently use environmental cues rather than letter knowledge when they appear to read. (FL)

Reveals that traits associated with early readers from low socioeconomic backgrounds are similar to traits associated with early readers from higher socioeconomic levels. (FL)

There are at least two kinds of phonetic knowledge: phoneme synthesis and analytic knowledge. In phoneme synthesis a person demonstrates phonetic knowledge by being able to assemble segments into larger units. With analytic knowledge one knows that syllables or words are analyzable into constituent segments. One type of knowledge enables learning…