The present study examined the strategies used by Greek novice readers in the initial phases of reading acquisition. Fifty (50) children were assessed at four successive testing periods throughout 1st grade of Primary School. Thus, 21 boys (42%) and 29 girls (58%) participated in this study. Their mean age at the beginning of the study was 74.43…

The overlapping waves model put forth by Robert Siegler emphasizes variability, adaptive choice, and gradual change in children's problem solving. These concepts were applied to emergent reading of an alphabet book with pages of three difficulty levels. Ninety-one kindergartners completed tests of emergent literacy. Twice, about 12 weeks apart,…

Research consistently documents that girls outperform boys in literacy achievement, yet, when considering the starting point--early literacy--we do not have consensus on the origin, meaningful nature, or persistence of such differences. In this two-part study analyzing 5,816 Norwegian students (48.1% girls, average age of 6.1 years), we first…

Working memory has been proposed to account for the differential rates in progress young children make in writing. One crucial aspect of learning to write is the encoding (i.e., integration) and retrieval of the correct phoneme-grapheme pairings, known as binding. In addition to executive functions, binding is regarded as central to the concept of…

The present longitudinal study aimed to investigate the development of word decoding skills during incremental phonics instruction in Dutch as a transparent orthography. A representative sample of 973 Dutch children in the first grade (M[subscript age] = 6;1, SD = 0;5) was exposed to incremental subsets of Dutch grapheme-phoneme correspondences…

We examined the developmental relationships between home literacy environment (parent teaching, shared book reading) and emergent literacy skills (phonological awareness, letter knowledge, vocabulary, rapid naming speed) in kindergarten, reading accuracy and fluency in Grade 1, and reading comprehension in Grades 2 and 3 in a sample of Canadian…

In this study, the investigators surveyed 215 early childhood educators throughout New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania to determine teacher knowledge and training in early literacy instruction, with a focus on The 5 Big Ideas in Reading as identified by the National Reading Panel: phonological awareness, accuracy and fluency, alphabetic principle,…

The purpose of this case study was to explore the effects of a literature-based social-emotional learning curriculum on kindergarten students' social-emotional behaviors, awareness, and early reading skills in a large elementary school. The study examined beliefs/perceptions of kindergarten teachers in regards to what reading skills students…