"Word Study: Emergent Sorts for Spanish-Speaking Multilingual Learners" is the ideal stage-specific companion to Word Study with Multilingual Learners. Beginning with picture concept sorts, it provides strategies to help teachers make sorting more meaningful. The text develops a routine for introducing English vocabulary, helping…

This article presents the outcomes of a study conducted in Victoria, Australia, that recognised teachers' knowledge and understanding of phonics teaching, and early literacy acquisition processes more generally. In total, 45 teachers and 220 students from the 18 focus schools who engaged in the reform initiative agreed to participate in this…

Headsprout Early Reading is a computer-based program designed on behavioral principles to enhance the basic skills that underpin the initial development of reading. In a within and between groups design, and using primary schools within Northern Ireland that had a currently high proportion of disadvantaged pupils, children who were behind their…

Teaching children to read is one of the most fundamental goals of early years and primary education worldwide, and as such has attracted a large amount of research from a range of academic disciplines. The aims of this paper are: (a) to provide a new critical examination of research evidence relevant to effective teaching of phonics and reading in…

Students with learning disabilities in word-level reading typically require explicit, systematic, and intensive phonics intervention. Teachers' capacity to provide effective intervention depends largely on their depth of understanding of language and their proficiency with evidence-based instructional methods. This article outlines the key…

On average, English language learners (ELLs) do not demonstrate the same academic achievement as their native English-speaking peers. The number of ELLs in U.S. schools has increased over the last several decades, as has the scholarly debate on how to best support ELLs in building foundational reading skills. The purpose of this study was to…

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…

Background: Despite evidence that synthetic phonics teaching has increased reading attainments, a sizable minority of children struggle to acquire phonics skills and teachers lack clear principles for deciding what types of "additional" support are most beneficial. Synthetic phonics teaches children to read using a decoding strategy to…

In this dissertation I report findings from two studies of the literacy abilities of children with Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic disorder associated with intellectual disability. I had two overarching goals: 1) evaluate the applicability of theories of reading and spelling acquisition developed based on typically developing children to…

Australian early childhood education positions literacy learning as a set of social practices contextualised by one's unique experiences and knowledges. Despite widespread agreement about the need to teach phonics and other code-breaking practices, the ways early childhood educators integrate "constrained" skills are not well understood…

Increasingly alarmed by instructional mandates more founded on journalistic rhetoric and popular opinion than on research findings or practitioner expertise, researchers gathered survey data from teachers to better understand the status of K-2 phonics instruction. Data demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of these K-2 teachers teach phonics,…

The problem addressed through this research study was although kindergarten through Grade 3 (K-3) reading teachers have received specific professional development in phonological methods, a gap in practice exists with the implementation of instructional strategies. The purpose of this study was to explore K-3 reading teachers' perspectives…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how K-2 teachers perceive the effectiveness of multi-sensory phonics methods used in conjunction with a standards-based reading curriculum on students' reading acquisition skills, students' decoding abilities, and student engagement in an inclusive classroom at a public charter school in…

This quantitative exploratory causal-comparative study investigated the relationship between public and private K-3 schoolteachers' perceptions of their pedagogical content knowledge and instructional practices of phonemic awareness and phonics, the two best predictors of reading comprehension proficiency. Gough and Tunmer's (1986) Simple View of…

The current study examined the effectiveness of a reading curriculum of explicit instruction on the letter-sound knowledge of a sample of elementary-aged students with Down syndrome. The procedures were adapted from prior research (King et al., 2020; Lemons et al., 2018; Lemons et al., 2015). Three participants between 9 and 11 years old…