Understanding the early literacy abilities of children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is essential for designing and testing methods of reading intervention focused on printed orthography. School-based professionals need assessments that measure word reading skills of students with heterogenous speech and physical…

Looking at Cape Henlopen School District as a whole, most students within the district are proficient in reading. When looking at data for young adults (18-22) with autism and other severe disabilities in the Sussex Consortium Life Skills Program, students were not proficient in reading. They could not read functional words within context. This…

In the current study, investigators examined the effects of an instructional reading package consisting of shared reading and systematic instruction (e.g., task analysis, system of least prompts, visual supports, and native language support) in a small group setting on percentage of correct consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words for three…

The number of students with reading difficulties is increasing and reading motivation is decreasing. Although serious reading problems can still persist during secondary education, most reading instruction happens in primary schools. In particular, students with learning disabilities and externalising behavioural problems are confronted with…

The author reviews theory and research by Ehri and her colleagues to document how a scientific approach has been applied over the years to conduct controlled studies whose findings reveal how beginners learn to read words in and out of text. Words may be read by decoding letters into blended sounds or by predicting words from context, but the way…

Learning irregular words involves mental marking of irregular letters in the spelling, a process not fully understood. In a within-subjects experiment, we manipulated the type of scaffolding given to beginning readers to evoke mental marking. We pretested to sort 103 kindergarten and first-grade participants into sequential decoders, who decode…

We modeled word reading growth in typically developing (n = 118) and children with dyslexia (n = 20), Grades 2-5, across multiple exposures to 30 words. We explored the facilitative versus inhibitory effects of exposures to differential mixes of words that support high- versus low-frequency vowel pronunciations. One training corpus contained a…

This study examined the effects of a reading racetrack game on acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of sight words for four kindergarten students who are deaf. The game consisted of placing sight words around a racetrack board and prompting the participant to read the words. A multiple probe design across word sets demonstrated a…

Students with learning and behavioral problems often face enormous barriers to successful school performance. When the language of instruction is not the students' first language and they are already in secondary school, this is compounded by additional challenges, especially with regard to vocabulary and reading -- subjects that are fundamental…

This study, which was drawn from a larger published work, examined language proficiency and literacy skills predictive of learning content and function words via the commonly used practice of flashcard word reading, which tests word knowledge in isolation. The current study also investigated differences in word learning performance between…

This paper addresses a gap in research regarding the efficacy of software programs to help children with reading difficulties. Forty-two children aged 5-13 years identified as poor readers participated in a study over twelve weeks using ReadingDoctor, a software program targeting phonemic awareness, orthographic-phonemic mappings, decoding ability…

Precision Teaching (PT) is an evidence-based intervention, which research indicates is frequently not implemented following training, with few teachers using it in schools after training events. The web-based programme in this research focuses on word-level reading skills and targets blending and segmenting skills rather than whole word reading.…

Incremental Rehearsal (IR) is an effective, evidence-based intervention for teaching words that uses high repetition and a high ratio of unknown and known items. The purpose of the present research study was to evaluate the effectiveness of using Incremental Rehearsal to improve the fluency in reading sight words for three elementary students…

Grounded in the simple view of reading, this study tracked the development of print-processing skill in high-, average-, and low-achieving readers at six time points across grades 1-3. Results showed large between-group differences in sight vocabulary, oral reading accuracy, and oral reading rate that remained stable from beginning of first grade…

This study aimed to (a) explore the roles of cognitive and language variables in predicting reading abilities of two groups of individuals with reading disabilities (i.e., dyslexia and specific language impairment) and (b) examine which variable(s) is the most predictive in differentiating two groups. Inclusion/exclusion criteria applied to…