In England, Higher Education institutions, together with the schools whose staff they train, are being required to incorporate synthetic phonics as one of the key approaches to the teaching of reading. Yet even if synthetic phonics can be identified as one of the component "skills" of reading, an assumption vigorously contested in this…

In this review, we lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary conversation between literacy education research and relevant neuroscience research. We review recent neuroscience research on correlates of proposed cognitive subprocesses in text decoding and reading comprehension and analyze some of the methodological and conceptual challenges of…

In decoding a text, one chooses the interpretation involving maximal redundancy, selecting meanings that are most likely and least surprising in the relevant context. Clues for this selection of meanings are gathered from phonetic, phonemic, morphological, syntactic, lexical, and stylistic levels. In disambiguating third-person-pronoun references…

The purpose of this study was to examine the character identification strategies of Chinese children during their oral reading of a continuous text. Eighteen second graders' oral reading of a story, as well as an interview about their decoding strategies, were audiotaped and transcribed. The results generally converged with those of previous oral…