When young children of Color from minoritized communities read decodable readers mandated by their school districts, children approach reading the texts with the expectation that the texts will make sense. While decodable readers allow children to apply their knowledge of phonics skills in context to support their word recognition, they tend to…

Background: Failure to learn early reading skills leads to lower reading comprehension later in elementary school (Double et al., 2019; Paige et al., 2019), which can then lead to poverty, underemployment, and increased likelihood of being incarcerated (World Literacy Foundation, 2018). Early reading skills are best developed in kindergarten…

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…

Purpose: It is often assumed that phonological awareness only reflects children's phonological skill. However, orthographic representations have been found to be automatically involved during phonological awareness tasks, which we refer to as automatic orthographic activation. Although previous longitudinal neural studies have addressed how…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of Spanish literacy precursor skills on reading learning to read in the mother tongue and their degree of transfer to English. A quasi-experimental design was used, which allowed for a repeated measures comparison between two groups of students, who underwent a follow-up assessment one year…

The author reviews theory and research by Ehri and her colleagues to document how a scientific approach has been applied over the years to conduct controlled studies whose findings reveal how beginners learn to read words in and out of text. Words may be read by decoding letters into blended sounds or by predicting words from context, but the way…

This phenomenological study reports findings related to preservice teachers' experiences mentoring early elementary readers. Preservice teachers in this study were enrolled in a literacy methods course designed to develop their understanding of early literacy, including knowledge of the written code and culturally sustaining and historically…

Learning irregular words involves mental marking of irregular letters in the spelling, a process not fully understood. In a within-subjects experiment, we manipulated the type of scaffolding given to beginning readers to evoke mental marking. We pretested to sort 103 kindergarten and first-grade participants into sequential decoders, who decode…

It is now widely accepted that phonological language skills are a critical foundation for learning to read (decode). This longitudinal study investigated the predictive relationship between a range of key phonological language skills and early reading development in a sample of 191 children in their first year at school. The study also explored…

We assessed the Swiss-German version of GraphoLearn, a computer game designed to support reading by training grapheme-phoneme correspondences. A group of 34 children at risk for dyslexia trained three times a week during 14 weeks, on top of their standard school instruction. The sample was divided into two groups of 18 and 16 children, who started…

Bringing effective, research-based literacy interventions into the classroom is challenging, especially given the cultural and linguistic diversity of today's classrooms. We examined the promise of Assessment-to-Instruction (A2i) technology redesigned to be used at scale to support teachers' implementation of the individualized student instruction…

Bringing effective, research-based literacy interventions into the classroom is challenging, especially given the cultural and linguistic diversity of today's classrooms. We examined the promise of Assessment-to-Instruction (A2i) technology redesigned to be used at scale to support teachers' implementation of the individualized student instruction…

Background: Many South African children attend African language medium of instruction (MOI) schools, learn English as an additional language and switch to English MOI three years later. There is still much to be researched about how a child's first and second language literacy develops over time in South Africa. Aim: This study aims to outline the…

Knowledge about preschool predictors of later reading comprehension is valuable for several reasons. On a general level, longitudinal studies can aid in generating understanding and causal hypotheses about language and literacy development, both of which are crucial processes in child development. A better understanding of these developmental…

The goal of the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide, "Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade," is to offer educators specific, evidence-based recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. The guide suggests…