The role of verbal working memory (VWM) in early language and literacy development among typical and atypical monolingual children exposed to different orthographies is well established. Less is known how English Language Learners (ELLs) allocate their VWM resources in early stages of literacy acquisition in English (L2). This study examined the…

Orthographic mapping (OM) involves the formation of letter-sound connections to bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory. It explains how children learn to read words by sight, to spell words from memory, and to acquire vocabulary words from print. This development is portrayed by Ehri (2005a) as a sequence of…

The goal of the current study was to determine whether Concept of Word in Text (COW-T) predicts later sight word reading achievement in Spanish, as it does in English. COW-T requires that children have beginning sound awareness, automatic recognition of letters and letter sounds, and the ability to coordinate these skills to finger point…

A quasi-experimental action research with a pretest-posttest same subject design was implemented to determine if there is a different effect of the flash card method and the multisensory approach on kindergarteners' achievement in sight word recognition, and which method is more effective if there is any difference. Instrumentation for pretest and…

Presents two activities for building elementary school students' vocabulary skills and increasing their knowledge of phonics and spelling patterns. The primary activity involves word mapping. The intermediate activity helps students pronounce and understand unfamiliar, multisyllabic words. A reproducible page on vocabulary strategies is included.…

Research has found similarities between specific reading disability and reading difficulty in children of low intelligence, especially in short-term memory deficits. Studies indicate that ability to acquire and use a knowledge of spelling patterns is a major problem, and efforts to teach more efficient decoding skills have met with limited…

Compares the abilities of good and poor readers in the second through fifth grades to read a frequency-graduated series of irregularly spelled words presented in isolation and in meaningful context, noting that the number of correctly read words varied with reading ability. (HOD)

Nonwords created by transposing two "adjacent" letters (i.e., transposed-letter (TL) nonwords like "jugde") are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words. This fact poses problems for most computational models of word recognition (e.g., the interactive-activation model and its extensions), which assume that exact…

Reports a case study of the reading and spelling processes of a developmentally disabled child indicating that there was almost a complete lack of alphabetic functions, that reading appeared to be based on a "logographic lexicon," and that spelling was based on a letter sequence generator. (RS)

Gives advanced and novice readers in grade one and older disabled readers nonword reading and spelling tasks. Finds that disabled readers read as many nonwords and spelled as many words as beginning readers, indicating equivalent alphabetic knowledge. Finds that disabled readers took significantly more trials to read 16 target words, indicating…

This study examined the validity and feasibility of a group-administered test of alphabetic reading skills for first-grade students. Two versions of a phonemic spelling test (production and multiple-choice) were administered in classroom groups to 153 students. Measures of vocabulary, phoneme awareness, letter sound knowledge, phonemic decoding,…

Intended to help dispel several unsupported "myths" about reading instruction, this book analyzes a selected group of teaching practices that have been supported by reading experts but not by research findings. The "myths" discussed in the first 12 chapters of the book are as follows: (1) phonics hinders comprehension; (2) unpredictable spelling…