This article explores primary school teachers' views and practices in literacy instruction to support students' word knowledge development. This study provides insights into how primary school teachers with a deep interest in literacy understand and apply the literacy strategies they employ in their classrooms, and how previous professional…

Purpose: Children learning to read in English must learn to read words with varying degrees of grapheme-phoneme correspondence regularity, but there is very little research comparing methods of instruction for words with less predictable or irregular spellings. Therefore, we compared three methods of instruction for beginning readers. Method:…

The use of cohesive devices in academic discourse not only improves the quality of writing but also enhances our learning experiences. This study aims to explain how the multimodal accounting discourse is constructed by postgraduate business students through the cohesive ties. Halliday and Hasan's and Halliday's cohesion analysis schemes were…

This research investigates a cohort of bilingual Chinese teachers' use of a multimodal approach in their Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) teaching. The data include the participants' CFL teaching practices and their reflections on multimodal teaching as recorded in their theses and a focus group discussion. The theoretical underpinning of this…

Australian students exhibit consistent challenges in learning Chinese characters, which inherently affect their Chinese literacy development in the long run. This article outlines a pedagogic intervention, which focuses on improving character recognition and vocabulary growth for students learning Chinese as a second language (L2). With a multiple…

This review highlights some areas of current interest in teaching students to spell and how spelling skills develop. The topics covered in the paper include: theories of spelling acquisition, theories guiding effective teaching, the importance of word study approaches across the age range, the influence of technology on learning to spell, spelling…

Learning the orthographic forms of words is important for both spelling and reading. To determine whether some methods of scoring children's early spellings predict later spelling performance better than do other methods, we analyzed data from 374 U.S. and Australian children who took a 10-word spelling test at the end of kindergarten (M age =…

Children who cannot spell fluently are likely to encounter difficulty in writing texts across the curriculum. Furthermore, spelling is often a component in high stakes tests, the results of which have significant implications for students and schools. In the context of debates on teacher quality, it is pertinent to examine the views of early…

Dual-route theories of reading posit that a sublexical reading mechanism that operates serially and from left to right is involved in the orthography-to-phonology computation. These theories attribute the masked onset priming effect (MOPE) and the phonological Stroop effect (PSE) to the serial left-to-right operation of this mechanism. However,…

The teaching of reading is a core priority across the education sector. In an attempt to better prepare our next generation of professional teachers of reading, academic staff at an Australian university implemented coursework changes that were designed to enhance the phonological awareness and orthographic knowledge of first-year preservice…

Paired-associate learning is a dynamic measure of the ability to form new links between two items. This study aimed to investigate whether paired-associate learning ability is associated with success in orthographic learning, and if so, whether it accounts for unique variance beyond phonological decoding ability and orthographic knowledge. A group…

Although there is robust evidence that skilled readers of English extract and use orthographic and phonological information from the parafovea to facilitate word identification, semantic preview benefits have been elusive. We sought to establish whether individual differences in the extraction and/or use of parafoveal semantic information could…

It is often assumed that graphemes are a crucial level of orthographic representation above letters. Current connectionist models of reading, however, do not address how the mapping from letters to graphemes is learned. One major challenge for computational modeling is therefore developing a model that learns this mapping and can assign the…

Many tests used in educational settings to identify learning difficulties endeavour to pick up only the lowest performers. Yet these tests are generally developed within a Classical Test Theory (CTT) paradigm that assumes that data do not have significant skew. Rasch analysis is more tolerant of skew and was used to validate two newly developed…

The main aim of this study was to develop standardised tests that assess some of the most important spelling skills for children in primary school: sound-letter mappings (non-lexical spelling) and word spelling accuracy (lexical spelling). We present normative comparison data for children in Grades 1-7 as well as measures of validity and…