The research question was, "What text characteristics do primary teachers think are most important for early grades text complexity?" Teachers from across the United States accomplished a two-part task. First, to stimulate teachers' thinking about important text characteristics, primary teachers completed an online paired-text…

The Common Core set a standard for all children to read increasingly complex texts throughout schooling. The purpose of the present study was to explore text characteristics specifically in relation to early-grades text complexity. Three hundred fifty primary-grades texts were selected and digitized. Twenty-two text characteristics were identified…

Decodable books based on previous classroom instruction are the most frequently used texts for 1st grade reading instruction in public schools, yet no empirical studies exist demonstrating their efficacy or their benefits for beginning readers. This study attempts to address this gap in the research literature by analyzing the reading behaviors of…

Leveled books originally selected by or produced for use in Reading Recovery or its regular classroom initiative are now also widely used in regular and special classrooms having no affiliation with Reading Recovery. The frequent use of these leveled books in settings other than Reading Recovery raises an important question: Do books leveled for…

Phonemic awareness tasks are identified: sound-to-word matching, word-to-word matching, rhyme recognition, isolation segmentation, counting sounds, blending, deletion, and substitution. Methods for teaching segmentation and blending, the most cortical tasks, are discussed. (Author/CP)

This digest provides basic information on phonological awareness in the process of learning to read for students with learning disabilities. It considers how phonological awareness fits into this process and the special problems experienced by children with learning disabilities or from culturally diverse backgrounds. Suggestions for teaching…

Reviewed theoretical and empirical work in phonological recoding, concluding that phonological representation is used to aid comprehension and suggesting that decoding graphemic information into a phonological form is important for early readers. Asserts that future research should examine differences in the use of visual versus phonological…