Shifting demographics in K-12 schools have increased Spanish-speaking Multi-Language Learners' (MLLs') enrollment across the United States. While literacy variations between MLLs and proficient English speakers have been studied predominantly with upper elementary students, there remains a need for more exploration among early elementary…

Signed languages around the world have tended to maintain an "oral," unwritten status. Despite the advantages of possessing a written form of their language, signed language communities typically resist and reject attempts to create such written forms. The present article addresses many of the arguments against written forms of signed…

We predicted that Arabic-speaking children with specific learning disabilities in reading (dyslexia) and spelling (in writing) benefit from a visuomotor-based intervention programme for the development of letter knowledge and the improvement of word and pseudo-word decoding as well as spelling (dictation). It was predicted that the mediation of…

The Malay language writing system is alphabetic and orthographically transparent. This study aimed to determine whether phonological processing skills predict Malay word-level literacy acquisition in Chinese children from a national-type Chinese primary school in Malaysia. A correlational study among 113 Year 1 Chinese children who are non-native…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the orthographic fast-mapping abilities of 5- and 6-year-old children across time to determine (a) growth in the ability to quickly acquire mental images of written words, (b) the effect of words' statistical regularities on the learning of written word images across time, (c) whether the…

Languages differ in the way that speech and meaning are represented in written form: in English, the correspondences are variable. Thus, in learning to read in English there is need for an approach that combines alphabetic decoding and a mastery of sight vocabulary. Teaching children to read should develop from an analysis of the skills and…

We present the case study of MB--a bilingual child with Down syndrome (DS) who speaks Russian (first language [L1]) and English (second language [L2]) and has learned to read in two different alphabets with different symbol systems. We demonstrate that, in terms of oral language, MB is as proficient in Russian as English, with a mild advantage for…

Traditional African literacy practices have often been ignored in the wake of European colonialism and the educational policies of colonial governments. Nonetheless, literacy had been established in parts of Africa following the introduction of Islam. This paper will examine the developments of literacy in pre-colonial West Africa. In this region,…

The special circumstances of bilingual and second language literacy learning offer investigators an important additional vantage point from which to better understand the components of reading ability. Cross-writing system comparisons complement this perspective. Comparing writing systems and how children learn to read through the medium of each…

In the present study, maternal Pinyin mediation and its relations with young Chinese children's word reading and word writing development were explored. At time 1, 43 Mainland Chinese children and their mothers were videotaped on a task in which children were asked to write 12 words in Pinyin (a phonological coding system used in Mainland China as…

The Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) Reading Assessment (FRA) consists of computer-adaptive reading comprehension and oral language screening tasks that provide measures to track growth over time, as well as a Probability of Literacy Success (PLS) linked to grade-level performance (i.e., the 50th percentile) on the reading comprehension…

The relationship between first language (L1) typology, defined as the classification of languages according to their structural characteristics (e.g. phonological systems and writing systems), and the development of second (L2) and third (L3) language skills and literacy proficiency in multilingual children was investigated in this study. The…

This dissertation study seeks to understand how teachers who work in an ASL/English bilingual educational program for preschool children conceptualize and utilize phonological instruction of American Sign Language (ASL). While instruction that promotes phonological awareness of spoken English is thought to provide educational benefits to young…

Many adolescent and adult L2 learners in language classrooms, both in the US and other countries, have little or no alphabetic print literacy. Language teachers may turn to SLA research for assistance, yet almost all research on oral SLA has focused on educated, highly-literate learners (Bigelow & Tarone 2004; Tarone, Bigelow & Hansen 2009). The…

Describes the difficulty in reading and writing Persian script which may contribute to illiteracy in Iran and notes the political and religious considerations which make change difficult. (MKM)