The purpose of this study was to conduct a program evaluation of a school district's Reading Recovery program. This quantitative study involved analysis of extant student reading achievement data from the first grade Phonological Awareness and Literacy Screener (PALS) and third grade Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) assessments.. Participants…

Input is considered one of the most important factors in the acquisition of lexical and grammatical skills. Input has been found to interact with other factors, such as learner cognitive skills and the circumstances where language is heard. Language learning itself has sometimes been found to enhance cognitive skills. Indeed, intensive contact…

The present longitudinal study investigated the role of spelling as a bridge between various reading-related predictors and English word reading in Chinese children learning English as a Second Language (ESL). One hundred and forty-one 5-year-old kindergarten children from Hong Kong, whose first language (L1) was Cantonese and second language (L2)…

This study examined whether web-based phonological awareness (PA) assessment in early childhood, specifically the year preceding formal schooling, could help educators reliably predict children's risk for reading difficulties in the first year of school. Ninety Australian children participated in several web-based PA tasks with a high priority…

Knowing how to provide effective literacy instruction is important for all educators, but it is critically important for urban educators. This article is built on the assumption that deepening urban educators' understanding of the reading process will better equip them to facilitate students' reading development, and to diagnose and intervene if…

Poor comprehenders have reading comprehension difficulties but normal word recognition ability. Here, we report the first study, which investigated (i) the dissociation and (ii) the prevalence of L1-L2 reading comprehension difficulties, and (iii) the levels of key metalinguistic skills in poor comprehenders among Chinese-English bilingual…

For language documentation to be sufficiently extensive to cover a given community's language practices (cf. Himmelmann 1998), then including verbal arts is essential to ensure the richness of that comprehensive record. The verbal arts span the creative and artistic uses of a given language by speakers, such as storytelling, songs, puns and…

We evaluated the impact of teaching complex grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPC) derived from the Simplicity Principle to at-risk poor readers in Grade 2 classrooms, using a two-arm dual site matched control trial intervention. Poor word readers (n = 149) were allocated to either a) Simplicity GPC (n= 79) or b) Letter-Name Control (n= 70) small…

Speech, reading, and writing are the basic forms of linguistic communication. Therefore, it is very important to diagnose any problems with them as early and completely as possible, particularly in children with special needs. One of the methods that focuses primarily on the diagnosis and therapy of such learning difficulties is the one developed…

This report summarizes the first year of the prekindergarten partnership between AISD, United Way for Greater Austin, and participating child development centers that served 417 students. Classrooms and students displayed high quality of instruction and academic performance, and teacher professional development opportunities are summarized.

More than 5 million English learners attend U.S. public schools--and yet fewer than 3% of teachers are certified to work with them. Fill that gap in teacher education with this practical and comprehensive textbook, an evidence-based guide to providing English learners in Pre-K-Grade 6 with explicit, systematic instruction on language and literacy…

Understand the science of reading and how to implement evidence-based instruction to increase the reading and writing achievement of pre-K-6 students, including those at risk for reading difficulties. Fully revised and updated, this core text covers the research base for structured literacy instruction and practical guidance on the essential…

This study aimed to enhance our knowledge of the constituent variables affecting invented writing skills in 5-year-olds by investigating the concurrent relationships among home literacy, underlying language skills, and invented writing. The study comprised 111 Norwegian-speaking children (mean age: 5.7 years; 58 girls) and their parents. The…

The aim of our study was to examine the relationship between NL (Native Language: Polish) phonological processing skills (verbal and phonological short-term memory, phoneme segmentation and blending, rapid automatised naming (RAN)) and the accuracy and fluency of NL and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) word and nonword decoding and word…

Listening has been widely characterised as a multifaceted process encompassing a range of linguistic and psycholinguistic components (see Rubin, 1994). However, for learners at different levels of L2 proficiency, there is uncertainty over the relative importance of the various sub-skills. To address this issue, a number of linguistic and…