A total of 29 low-income, prekindergarten children, attending a summer school program, participated in a six-week shared book-reading (SBR) intervention. Children were randomly assigned to one of four conditions that varied in the extent to which teachers embedded an explicit emphasis on print (code-focused interactions), vocabulary…

Literacy levels in Africa are low, and school instruction outcomes are not promising. Africa also has a disproportionate number of unschooled children. Phonological awareness (PA), especially phoneme awareness, is critically associated with literacy, but there is little evidence about whether PA is gained through literacy, schooling, or both,…

Although reading outcomes for children with hearing loss are improving, too many of these children continue to display persistent reading difficulties. Because of these difficulties, there is an ongoing need to understand the nature of the relationships among decoding abilities, language skills, and reading achievement in this population more…

The purpose of the present study was to explore the role of morphological awareness in reading comprehension in different language learning contexts (ESL and EFL). Korean ESL and Korean EFL learners (50 and 257 respectively) in grades five and six were administered measures of L2 (English) morphological, phonological, and orthographic awareness…

This study examined pinyin (the official phonetic system that transcribes the lexical tones and pronunciation of Chinese characters) invented spelling and English invented spelling in 72 Mandarin-speaking 6th graders who learned English as their second language. The pinyin invented spelling task measured segmental-level awareness including…

Teacher knowledge in early literacy instruction has been questioned in the field for over 20 years. A theoretical framework outlined by Chall, coupled with the findings of the National Reading Panel, provides a strong foundation for the disciplinary knowledge required to teach children to read. The "Basic Language Constructs Survey," a…

Understanding how children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) improve oral language skills in relationship to tutor prompting has not yet been investigated. The study examined how variation in language prompt use by tutors during a storybook reading intervention influences growth in vocabulary and emergent literacy for young children with ASD.…

Convergent evidence suggests that syllables play a primary and distinctive role in the phonological phase of Mandarin Chinese word production. Specifically, syllables are selected before other phonological components and guide subsyllabic encoding. The proximity of phonological syllables to word representations in Chinese languages ensures that…

The development of spelling skill is a very difficult task for students with dyslexia. Spelling in French involves the consideration of various types of knowledge, procedures and strategies. This study aims to describe the spelling strategies of 32 dyslexic students (DYS) aged from 8 to 12 years and to establish links between spelling strategies…

One of the aspects of L2 English phonology which poses a challenge for L2 learners is learning how to decode the language, especially as spoken by native speakers. This difficulty may be due to the way the native speakers speak by 'draw[ing] [the sounds] together' (Clarey & Dixson, 1963), which results in realization of consonants and vowels…

Literacy is a powerful tool against poverty, leading to further education and vocational success. In sub-Saharan Africa, schoolchildren commonly learn in two languages--African and European. Multiple early literacy skills (including phonological awareness and receptive language) support literacy acquisition, but this has yet to be empirically…

Skilled reading is a complex process in which many subskills are involved, including an awareness of the morphological structure of language. Morphological awareness is the ability to understand how words are broken into meaningful units (e.g., affixes, root words). Explicit and systematic teaching of morphological concepts are reported to help…

Addressing the needs of students with dyslexia requires an in-depth knowledge of various components of a multi-dimensional approach to reading intervention, which is supported by an understanding of the structure of the language being taught. The current study explored the association between teacher knowledge of the English language and different…

Concept of word in print is the development of an understanding of how monosyllabic and multisyllabic words operate in print. Young children show evidence of this understanding when they are able to repeat a line of text while accurately pointing to each word as it is said. A small but robust line of work has examined the knowledge, skills, and…

The majority of recent studies conclude that children's private speech development (private speech internalisation) is important for mathematical development and subject to disabling. The main concern of the present study was whether or not the two phonological memory factors evaluated in the study (i.e. the results of children's digit span…