Purpose: The goal of this study was to test whether fronting and lengthening of lax vowels influence the perception of femininity in listeners whose dialect is characterized as already having relatively fronted and long lax vowels in male and female speech. Method: Sixteen English words containing the /? ? ? ?/ vowels were produced by a male…

"Word Study with Students Who Struggle: Reading, Vocabulary, and Spelling Instruction, Grades 4-12" is intended for the middle and secondary classroom teacher. This handy book emphasizes the use of word study with its hands-on, accessible approach, to help students catch up with their peers. This book will help you determine student…

Reading fluency is one of several components of an effective reading program. One way to increase a student's reading fluency is teaching word attack skills as a way to break words down into smaller parts. Strategies, such as direct teaching of word attack skills, can make it easier for students to read unknown words. Understanding and applying…

This study explores the possibility that early word segmentation is aided by infants' tendency to segment words with repeated syllables ("reduplication"). Twenty-four nine-month-olds were familiarized with passages containing one novel reduplicated word and one novel non-reduplicated word. Their central fixation times in response to…

This is a practical article for teachers in the primary grades and for other teachers and reading specialists whose students experience difficulty responding automatically to high-frequency words. In this article, we will begin by providing some helpful information about vocabulary and high-frequency words in particular. You will learn why…

Lexical stress assignment plays a central role in being understood in a second language. In fact, research has shown that it may be more important for the comprehensibility of second language learners' speech than, for example, grammatical correctness (Trofimovich & Isaacs, 2012). Nonetheless, its production poses challenges for second…

Throughout elementary education, foundational literacy has been one of the essential components of students' reading and writing abilities. For students to be successful in their literacy skills, it is necessary for them to be afforded systematic word study instruction through the intentional teaching of foundational skills along with multisensory…

For the purpose of this article within this special issue on Structured Literacy™, we were asked to address the code-focused skills of phonemic awareness and word reading. Findings from research studies converge to show that explicit and systematic instruction helps most students understand how speech sounds, or phonemes, map to letters and…

Access to quality literacy instruction is access to acceptance into the literate community in which students with severe disabilities live and work. Providing that instruction to students with severe disabilities who are not traditional readers and writers can be challenging. Luckily, there are many easy and interactive tools available for…

In this article Paul Nation responds to Thomas Cobb's "Numbers or Numerology? A Response to Nation (2014) and McQuillan (2016)" (EJ1117024). Nation begins by clarifying his own position on vocabulary learning and goes on to highlight points made in Cobb's article with which he is in agreement, while drawing from his 2014 article,…

This teaching tip identifies ways to "WIN" at vocabulary learning. Specifically, the approach conveys three morphological strategies in the mnemonic "WIN." These three strategies remind students to find smaller units of meaning within bigger words, look for those units in other words that they know, and notice the context. Each…

The ways in which adult learners study information influences their judgment-of-learning (JOL) accuracy (e.g., Koriat et al. "Journal of Experimental Psychology: General," determine whether developing learners' metacognitive monitoring is similarly influenced by different study techniques. In two experiments, we examined JOL accuracy in…

Middle school is often the last place where students are taught basic reading skills such as phonology, morphology, fluency, and comprehension before they move on to high school where reading is predominately focused on understanding, analysis, application and evaluation of content area material. In addition, middle school students are exposed to…

This study was designed to explore the effectiveness of balanced literacy instruction in two pre-kindergarten programs in a North Eastern suburban school district. The researcher used a mixed-methods design which included classroom observations, student performance data, and teacher interviews to determine if the language arts program produced…

This retrospective, exploratory investigation examined the types of target words that 66 children with/without word-finding difficulties (WFD) had difficulty naming, and the types of errors they made. Words were studied with reference to lexical factors (LFs) that might influence naming performance: word frequency, familiarity, length, phonotactic…