The objective for beginning writers is to learn how to generate alphabet-letters which are recognisable and easy to read. This study investigated the accuracy of Year 1 and 2 children's alphabet-letter-writing by evaluating their alphabet and orthographic knowledge, following evidence which identifies these skills as important for correctly…

We examined the cognitive, language, and instructional factors associated with reading ability in Williams syndrome (WS). Seventy 9-year-olds with WS completed standardized measures of real-word reading, pseudoword decoding, reading comprehension, phonological skills, listening comprehension, nonverbal reasoning, visual-spatial ability, verbal…

An experiment examined orthographic facilitation of vocabulary learning, that is, whether showing students spellings of novel words during learning helps them remember the words when spellings are no longer present. The purpose was to determine whether having students decode the spellings of vocabulary words improves word learning over passive…

This study investigated how word and child characteristics affect children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words. Participants were fourth- and fifth-graders representing native English speakers (NE) and bilingual learners with fluent English proficiency (FEP) and designated English Learners (EL). Students were taught the meanings of a…

Working memory has been proposed to account for the differential rates in progress young children make in writing. One crucial aspect of learning to write is the encoding (i.e., integration) and retrieval of the correct phoneme-grapheme pairings, known as binding. In addition to executive functions, binding is regarded as central to the concept of…

Studies have shown that children benefit from a spelling pronunciation strategy in remembering the spellings of words. The current study determined whether this strategy also helps adults learn to spell commonly misspelled words. Participants were native English speaking college students (N = 42), mean age 22.5 years (SD = 7.87). An experimental…

This study examined the skills predicting early reading development when children were taught by a synthetic phonics approach. Eighty five children taught to read by systematic synthetic phonics were assessed on reading and cognitive assessments prior to reading instruction (average age 4 years, 7 months), 6 months later (5 years, 1 month), and 73…

The present longitudinal study aimed to investigate the development of word decoding skills during incremental phonics instruction in Dutch as a transparent orthography. A representative sample of 973 Dutch children in the first grade (M[subscript age] = 6;1, SD = 0;5) was exposed to incremental subsets of Dutch grapheme-phoneme correspondences…

The quality of handwriting curriculum and instructional practices in actual classrooms was investigated in an in-depth case study of four inner city kindergarten classrooms using quantitative and qualitative methods. The handwriting proficiency of students was also evaluated to assess the impact of the instructional practices observed. The…