In this article, I illustrate how research from cognitive science and the science of reading can inform research on the science of reading instruction. This purpose is accomplished by focusing on four recently published randomized control trials of instruction designed to teach alphabet letters to 3- and 4-year-old children (N = 342) attending…

Letter learning is nuanced, complex, and essential to the development of an effective literacy processing system. Forming and naming letters, rapidly differentiating between visually similar letters, and recognizing their sound correspondences are foundational to becoming a reader and writer. Indeed, control over letters affects monitoring,…

Application of psycholinguistic insights initiated a long career researching how children learn to read words. A theory was proposed claiming that spellings of individual words are stored in memory when their graphemes become bonded to phonemes in their pronunciations along with meanings, and this enables readers to read stored words automatically…

Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN) is commonly thought of as one of the best predictors of reading achievement when compared to phonological awareness and letter name knowledge (Norton & Wolf, 2012). However, only one previous study has demonstrated significant growth following a RAN intervention (Vander Stappen & Reybroeck, 2018). This…

Incremental rehearsal (IR) is a flashcard intervention that involves the interspersal of previously mastered targets and immediate error correction. Previous research indicates IR is an effective intervention for teaching discrete skills. Much of existing research, however, was conducted with typically developing students. The current study aimed…

While mobile devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous (even in low-income families in the United States) and are being used for educational purposes, it is unclear how these technological tools may benefit letter learning (a foundational precursor to early literacy achievement) in preschool children. To contribute clarity, this study tested…

Learning the relationships between letters and sounds is a key component of early literacy development and a central aim during the first year of school. Introducing one new letter a week is the most common approach in many countries, but little is known about how the pace of letter instruction contributes to the development of early literacy…

Recently, there has been growing concern about how to most effectively support the literacy development of beginning and struggling readers with regard to helping them learn to effortlessly identify the huge number of words that proficient readers ultimately learn to read with automaticity. Some, noting the critical importance of phonics…

In the present study, a 5-week tablet-based word reading efficiency game intervention (Reading Turbo) was integrated in a comprehensive phonics-based reading curriculum. The aims of the study were to examine whether the game would advance children's word reading efficiency, and to determine the extent to which pre-reading capacities and in-game…

Background/Context: Reading achievement declined drastically during the COVID-19 pandemic (Bailey et al., 2021). One report suggests more than one-third of fourth-grade students cannot read at a basic level and access to effective literacy instruction is particularly limited for minority students and students with learning disabilities (Ellis et…

Previous research with alphasyllabaries has shown that children struggle with akshara that have two or more consonants, known as complex akshara. We developed a mobile game that teaches 4th grade children Hindi decoding skills, with an emphasis on complex akshara. All of the children were second language learners of Hindi. There were two versions…

In the study, the authors addressed two areas of inquiry: the influence of enlisting three underlying cognitive learning processes in alphabet learning, and order effects for letter name and letter sound instruction. Alphabet instruction was designed to enlist paired-associate learning (PAL) only, PAL plus orthographic learning, or PAL plus…

In Study 1, the treatment group (N = 33 first graders, M = 6 years 10 months, 16 girls) received Slingerland multi-modal (auditory, visual, tactile, motor through hand, and motor through mouth) manuscript (unjoined) handwriting instruction embedded in systematic spelling, reading, and composing lessons; and the control group (N = 16 first graders,…

The purpose of this true experimental, posttest-only control-group design was to determine if the color coding of exterior letters affects the fluency and decoding ability among fourth grade students who were below grade level in reading. If color coding exterior letters is an effective intervention, then struggling readers could utilize this…

The purpose of this experimental study was to examine the contribution of phoneme awareness training and orthography to the learning of new vocabulary words by partial alphabetic phase readers. Hypotheses included: Preschoolers taught to phonemically segment words with letters would outperform those trained without letters on an invented spelling…