The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of multilevel support on first-grade teachers' accurate use of research-based strategies during beginning reading instruction and the extent to which teachers maintained use of these strategies. Teachers were trained to use research-based strategies, including choral responding, response…

Research has linked early literacy environments to the attitudes, behaviours and instructional values of reading teachers, but most prior research has addressed preservice or early inservice teachers. This mixed-methods, hypothesis-generating, "Q" methodology-based study explored the relationship between early literacy environments and…

Staff development training is a method many public schools employ in an effort to prepare their teaching staff to better meet the demands of effectively educating district students. In this mixed methods case study quantitative and qualitative data was incorporated to answer four research questions: (1) How accurately do scores achieved by…

This paper reports an extended analysis of the study reported in [Wood, C. (2005). "Beginning readers' use of 'talking books' software can affect their reading strategies." "Journal of Research in Reading, 28," 170-182.], in which five and six-year-old children received either six sessions using specially designed talking books or six sessions of…

This study attempted to provide a systematic framework for phonics instruction for beginning readers in literature-based classrooms based on relative frequency of phoneme-grapheme occurrences found in three distinct corpora. The first corpus contained an academic word list. The second corpus contained the running text from 363 books identified as…

Relations between preservice teachers' guided field observations of primary literacy instruction and knowledge about effective beginning reading practices were explored. Preservice teachers (n = 48) participated in a Directed Field Experience course including instruction on and observations of exemplary teaching practices promoting student…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 created the Reading First program to help ensure that all students could read at or above grade level by the end of grade 3. The program promotes practices recommended by the National Reading Panel for early reading instruction, highlighting essential components of reading instruction. As required by the…