In this article, I (a) overview the ebbs and flows of two beginning reading approaches (code-emphasis and balanced instruction) used in U.S. schools from 1950 to the present; (b) compare and contrast the two instructional approaches; and (c) suggest some simple assessment procedures that can be used to measure student learning. In closing, I…

Classroom reading instruction is the foundation of Multi-Tiered Systems of Support in Reading (MTSS-R) and the focus of many state reading reforms, initiatives, and policies. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether comprehensive and coordinated Tier 1 core reading instruction was associated with higher early reading outcomes of students…

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…

Many digital reading applications have built-in features to control the presentation flow of texts by segmenting those texts into smaller linguistic units. Whether and how these segmentation techniques affect the readability of texts is largely unknown. With this background, the current study examined a recent proposal that a sentence-by-sentence…

The purpose of this report was to evaluate the Lalilo software program. This large-scale quasi-experimental study independently conducted by Lehigh University reported that K-1 students in schools using Lalilo increased their early literacy skills at a greater rate than students in similar schools that did not use Lalilo.

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…

Background: The delivery of effective, evidence-based early reading instruction depends partially on teachers' knowledge about reading acquisition, development, and pedagogy. Research shows that teachers often perform poorly on measures of reading-related knowledge, often cited as one explanation for a gap between reading research and classroom…

This independent quasi-experimental study conducted by WestEd reported that Lalilo had a large significant positive impact on students' oral reading fluency skills. This is an important outcome because fluency is both a critical component of literacy and a strong predictor of later reading success. Effects were particularly strong for students…

The phonics screening check (PSC) was introduced in England in 2012 for children in Year 1. There have been criticisms in relation to its reliability and appropriateness as an assessment tool for early reading although supporters of the PSC see it as a valuable tool in securing progress in reading. The DfE-funded evaluation concluded, however,…

Two methods of decoding instruction were compared. Participants were kindergartners who knew letter sounds but could not decode nonwords, M = 5.6 years. The segmented phonation treatment taught students to convert graphemes to phonemes by breaking the speech stream ("sss -- aaa -- nnn") before blending. The connected phonation treatment…

Purpose: Children learning to read in English must learn to read words with varying degrees of grapheme-phoneme correspondence regularity, but there is very little research comparing methods of instruction for words with less predictable or irregular spellings. Therefore, we compared three methods of instruction for beginning readers. Method:…

This article is a rejoinder to J.S. Bowers (2020), 'Reconsidering the evidence that systematic phonics is more effective than alternative methods of reading instruction', "Educational Psychology Review" (https://doi-org.bibliotheek.ehb.be/10.1007/s10648-019-09515-y). There is strong agreement among reading scientists that learning the phonological…

In this experiment, we examined whether beginning readers benefit more from grapheme-phoneme decoding (GPD) than from whole-syllable decoding (WSD) instruction in learning to read and write words. Sixty Brazilian Portuguese-speaking first graders (M age = 6 years 1 month) who knew letter names but could not read or write words were randomly…

This study examined the combined effects of teachers' instructional practices and students' reading-related affective engagement on predicting the high and low levels of elementary reading literacy from a linguistically and culturally comparative perspective. Data were based on 9748 students from 4 English-speaking and 3 Chinese-speaking education…

This paper examines how 15 London social enterprise nurseries undertook a short pilot study to ascertain how to successfully replace a formal reading scheme with the Whitehurst and Lonigan dialogic reading (DR) approach. DR has shown to work very successfully with children from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds, which is the focus group of the…