The developmental course of neural tuning to visual letter strings is unclear. Here we tested 39 children longitudinally, at the beginning of grade 1 (6.45 ± 0.33 years old) and 1 year after, with fast periodic visual stimulation in electroencephalography to assess the evolution of selective neural responses to letter strings and their…

Culturally Relevant Pedagogical (CRP; Ladson-Billings, 1995) and textual strategic approaches to reading development are gaining acceptance and broader usage among students of all ages and walks of life. With this shift, quantitative measures of efficacy can confirm, bolster, and source new policies and strategies for implementation in new and…

Formal thought organization obtained from free speech, a key feature for psychiatric evaluations, has been poorly investigated during typical development. Computational tools such as speech graph connectedness (LSC) currently allow for an accurate quantification in naturalistic settings. LSC's typical development is better predicted by years of…

This study used eye-tracking to examine whether extraneous illustration details--a common design in beginning reader storybooks--promote attentional competition and hinder learning. The study used a within-subject design with first- and second-grade children. Children (n = 60) read a story in a commercially available Standard condition and in a…

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…

Learning to read is a process that begins well before children commence formal schooling and well before children learn to decode print. Children's early reading skills are, first and foremost, foundationally contingent upon children's oral language and phonological awareness proficiencies -- skills that can be mapped across a continuum of…

While numerous studies evaluate the effectiveness of teacher training and textbook distribution programs, few look at the effects of training programs on vulnerable students, those at the lower end of academic performance. Addressing this gap is important to improve the efficiency of student learning and address the equity gaps in early education.…

Empirical evidence supports the importance of executive function (EF) in reading, but the underlying mechanism through which EF contributes to the reading process is unclear. The present study examined the direct and indirect effects of EF on reading comprehension through the indirect pathway of language and cognitive skills (i.e., syntactic…

Adopting a reading culture is a process that takes shape in family starting from the moment the child is born and school environment. The most critical phase of this process is the "preschool period." Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to construct a systematic intervention to create a reading culture in the preschool period.…

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…

Sight word learning occurs in most early elementary classrooms. Some kindergarten students face the prospect of learning up to 100 sight words, and many teachers feel pressure to ensure that students know lists of words by the year's end. The authors offer five assertions about sight word learning to direct teachers and administrators toward the…

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…

Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN) is commonly thought of as one of the best predictors of reading achievement when compared to phonological awareness and letter name knowledge (Norton & Wolf, 2012). However, only one previous study has demonstrated significant growth following a RAN intervention (Vander Stappen & Reybroeck, 2018). This…

The purpose of the current study was to determine students' early reading profiles at the beginning and end of kindergarten using existing school-based measures with a sample of Spanish speaking, Latinx students. Using latent profile analysis, a multivariate analytic technique that empirically identifies profiles based on student responses to…

The study presented here was aimed at understanding how teachers go about appropriating technology from the iRead EU Horizon 2020 Project into the classroom. iRead provides an adaptive personalised literacy game called Navigo that is deployed in tablets and intended for regular usage in the elementary school classroom. In our case, the game was…