For bilingual children, the results of language and literacy screening tools are often hard to interpret. This leads to late referral for specialized assessment or inappropriate interventions. To facilitate the early identification of reading difficulties in English, we developed a method of screening that is theory-driven yet suitable for…

Four evidence-based instructional approaches create an essential resource for any early literacy teacher or coach. Improve your teaching practices in all areas of early literacy. Use four proven instructional approaches--standards based, evidenced based, assessment based, and student based--to improve their teaching practice in all areas of early…

The connections among language, writing system, and reading are part of what confronts a child in learning to read. We examine these connections in addressing how reading processes adapt to the variety of written language and how writing adapts to language. The first adaptation (reading to writing), as evidenced in behavioral and neuroscience…

It is commonly assumed that children with dyslexia are slower at handwriting than other children. However, evidence of slow handwriting in children with dyslexia is very mixed. Thirty-one children with dyslexia, aged 9 years, were compared to both age-matched children and younger spelling-ability matched children. Participants completed an…

Providing preschoolers with rich writing experiences can help to lay a foundation for their later reading and writing success. Early writing experiences can be greatly enhanced by how preschool teachers answer young children's questions about writing and engage them in productive writing instruction. With appropriate scaffolding, early writing…

Early childhood interventions that target numeracy, language, and literacy skills can help to mitigate negative educational outcomes among young children from low- to middle-income families in developing countries. The current study evaluates the efficacy of parent coaching programs designed to enrich home numeracy and literacy environments in…

In a recent article, Boers, Demecheleer, Coxhead, and Webb (2014) deplored the lack of effectiveness for the learning of verb-noun collocations of a number of exercise formats which they sampled from EFL textbooks and put to the test in a series of quasi-experimental trials. The authors called for further investigations into possible improvements…

This study examined the relationship and degree of predictability that the fluency of writing the alphabet from memory and the selection of allographs have on measures of fluency and accuracy of spelling in a free-writing sentence task when keyboarding. The "Test Estandarizado para la Evaluación de la Escritura con Teclado"…

This study examined the predictive validity of formative assessments embedded in a Tier 2 intervention curriculum for kindergarten students identified as at risk for reading difficulty. We examined when (i.e., months during the school year) measures could predict reading outcomes gathered at the end of kindergarten and whether the predictive…

Inequalities on child cognitive outcomes exist as children enter the first grade. These differences are even wider for children in low-income families. This article aims to examine the extent to which home factors account for variation in early literacy outcomes in the first year of schooling. A total of 72 first graders and their parents from…

Typical group activities for kindergarten children depend heavily on children's ability to follow directions, respond verbally to adults' prompts, take turns, initiate, and sustain peer interactions. Therefore, young children with autism may often be excluded from academic group activities because their social skills are under-developed or delayed…

The early skills of Emergent Literacy include the knowledge and abilities related to the alphabet, phonological awareness, symbolic representation, and communication. However, existing models of emergent literacy focus on discrete skills and miss the perspective of the surrounding environment. Early literacy skills, including their relationship to…

Noting the lack of research on how early childhood education (ECE) programmes within family literacy programmes influence Latino children's early language and literacy development, this study examined key features of ECE programmes, specifically teacher-child interactions and child engagement in language and literacy activities and how these…

Movement, which draws on motor skills and executive functions for managing them, plays an important role in literacy learning (e.g., movement of mouth during oral reading and movement of hand and fingers during writing); but relatively little research has focused on movement skills in students with specific learning disabilities as the current…

This study investigates the impact of using an adaptive computer-assisted instruction (CAI) program in early childhood education. The Waterford Early Reading Program (ERP) is a CAI program that was assigned to kindergarten and first grade students in a school district in Texas for the 2015-2016 school year. The Texas Primary Reading Inventory…