Set for variability (SfV) is an oral language task that requires an individual to disambiguate the mismatch between the decoded form of an irregular word and its actual lexical pronunciation. For example, in the task, the word wasp is pronounced to rhyme with clasp (i.e. /waesp/), and the individual must recognize the actual pronunciation of the…

A hallmark of skilled reading is recognizing written words automatically from memory by sight. How beginning readers attain this skill is explained. They must acquire foundational knowledge, including phonemic segmentation, grapheme-phoneme knowledge, decoding, and spelling skills. When these skills are applied, spellings of words become bonded to…

The article explores the importance of early reading proficiency and its long-term impact on academic and life outcomes, particularly in Romania. Analyzing PISA data, the article highlights significant literacy gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students, as well as urban and rural learners. These disparities perpetuate intergenerational…

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…

It is now widely accepted that phonological language skills are a critical foundation for learning to read (decode). This longitudinal study investigated the predictive relationship between a range of key phonological language skills and early reading development in a sample of 191 children in their first year at school. The study also explored…

Reading fluency has been acknowledged as a key component in the process of learning to read. As students enter kindergarten, many of them do not have the early or emergent literacy skills they need in order to become fluent readers. Kindergarten students in a Midwest suburban elementary school were studied focusing on their development of reading…

Fluency with skills that operate below the word level (i.e., sublexical), such as phonemic awareness and alphabetic knowledge, may ease the acquisition of decoding skills (Ritchey & Speece, 2006). Measures of sublexical fluency such as phoneme segmentation fluency (PSF), letter naming fluency (LNF), and letter sound fluency (LSF) are widely…

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…

The goal of the study was to examine the association between visual-attentional span and lexical decision in skilled adult readers. In the span tasks, an array of letters was presented briefly and recognition or production of a single cued letter (partial span) or production of all letters (whole span) was required. Independently of letter…

The First Grade Baseline Evaluation is an optional tool that can be used at the beginning of the school year to help teachers get to know the reading and language skills of each student. The evaluation is composed of seven screenings. Teachers may use the entire evaluation or choose to use those individual screenings that they find most beneficial…

Phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) are well-known kindergarten predictors of later word recognition skills, but it is not clear whether they predict developments in accuracy or speed, or both. The present longitudinal study of 172 Danish beginning readers found that speed of word recognition mainly developed…

The First Grade Pre-Screening is designed to be used at the start of the first grade school year so that teachers can obtain information about their incoming students. This information is intended to give teachers insight about what math and reading skills a student may or may not have at the beginning of the year. The information can aid teachers…

This study examined the cognitive skills associated with early reading development when children were taught by different types of instruction. Seventy-nine children (mean age at pre-test 4;10 (0.22 S.D.) and post-test 5;03 (0.21 S.D.)) were taught to read either by an eclectic approach which included sight-word learning, guessing from context and…

This study examined the influences of problem behaviors on kindergarten reading outcomes and investigated the extent to which explicit, code-based reading instruction moderated those relations among 206 children identified as being at risk of reading difficulty. Children from the classrooms of 57 kindergarten teachers in 12 schools were randomly…

The purpose of this review was to update previous reviews on factors related to students' responsiveness to early literacy intervention. The 14 studies in this synthesis used experimental designs, provided small-group or one-on-one reading interventions, and analyzed factors related to responsiveness to those interventions. Participants were…