Understanding the early literacy abilities of children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is essential for designing and testing methods of reading intervention focused on printed orthography. School-based professionals need assessments that measure word reading skills of students with heterogenous speech and physical…

Purpose: This study aimed to elucidate the nature of the relationship between the development of decoding and encoding skills in the first year at school. Method: The foundational literacy skills of one hundred eighty 5-year-old children were examined on three occasions over their first year of literacy instruction. Participants received the same…

Irregular words cannot be read correctly by decoding letters into sounds using the most common letter-sound mapping relations. They are difficult to read and learn. Cognitive models of word reading and development as well as empirical data suggest that inhibitory control might be important for irregular word reading and its development. The…

Learning to read is one of the most important components of education and literacy skills in early childhood have a significant impact on later reading success. There is an abundance of quantitative research focused on reading, known as the science of reading. However, gaps and flaws have been identified in the research, indicating that an…

The need for effective reading instruction is of high priority. One of the many ways that students learn to read is through multisensory instruction. Elementary-age students struggle to become proficient readers. This is due to the lack of reading skills. The goal of reading is comprehension. As students learn letter-sound correspondence,…

Since 2012, when preparatory grade (PG) became compulsory in Romania for 6-year olds, little understanding has been gained of how children's literacy evolves in PG, although over the same period, Romanian 15-year olds' reading performance has shown no signs of improvement (Noveanu et al., 2023). Children enter school with broadly varying literacy…

Background: Despite evidence that synthetic phonics teaching has increased reading attainments, a sizable minority of children struggle to acquire phonics skills and teachers lack clear principles for deciding what types of "additional" support are most beneficial. Synthetic phonics teaches children to read using a decoding strategy to…

Background: Failure to learn early reading skills leads to lower reading comprehension later in elementary school (Double et al., 2019; Paige et al., 2019), which can then lead to poverty, underemployment, and increased likelihood of being incarcerated (World Literacy Foundation, 2018). Early reading skills are best developed in kindergarten…

The importance of letter sound knowledge (LSK) as a precursor to later literacy skills has been well-documented. Since English language learners (ELLs), or students who first acquired a language other than English, continue to underperform in reading compared to their English-speaking peers, they are particularly at-risk for reading and academic…

The What Works Clearinghouse™ is a federally funded source of scientific evidence for what works in education. The What Works Clearinghouse aims to disseminate findings from rigorous education research to the education community. One mechanism for accomplishing this aim is the production of practice guides. Panels of national content experts,…

This study explored the effects of instruction in letter sound correspondence (LSC) with four preschool students with disabilities. The study included participants with developmental delay, autism spectrum disorder, and communication disorders. Researchers incorporated nonverbal methods of response to accommodate study participants with…

Central questions in the study of visual word recognition and developmental dyslexia are whether early lexical activation precedes and supports decoding (a dual-stage view) or not (dual-route view), and the locus of deficits in dysfluent reading. The dual-route view predicts early word frequency and length interaction, whereas the dual-stage view…

A brief experiment was designed to examine cognitive flexibility practice embedded in beginning phonics instruction for kindergarteners with limited early literacy learning. Previously tested phonics content included single- and high-frequency two-letter grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs), introduced at a rate of 2-4 correspondences per week.…

In this experiment, we examined whether beginning readers benefit more from grapheme-phoneme decoding (GPD) than from whole-syllable decoding (WSD) instruction in learning to read and write words. Sixty Brazilian Portuguese-speaking first graders (M age = 6 years 1 month) who knew letter names but could not read or write words were randomly…

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…