This practitioner article presents a data-driven phonemic awareness intervention model designed for K-2 students in a rural Title 1 elementary school. The purpose of the project was to address foundational reading gaps among early learners, particularly in communities with limited preschool access, low graduation rates, and minimal family-school…

Purpose: We investigated the role of spoken language in the acquisition of literacy in the context of Arabic diglossia, where the written language, Standard Arabic, deviates substantially from the spoken language, Colloquial Arabic, children acquire naturally from birth. Method: The participants (N = 110; 40 girls) were Saudi Arabic--speaking…

There is tremendous variation in the use of American English by major geographic regions, as well as within these regions or cities, and by cultural background. The variety of English spoken by many African American people in the United States is called African American English (AAE). AAE affects early literacy skills in ways that may require…

The problem addressed through this research study was although kindergarten through Grade 3 (K-3) reading teachers have received specific professional development in phonological methods, a gap in practice exists with the implementation of instructional strategies. The purpose of this study was to explore K-3 reading teachers' perspectives…

Verbal Fluency (VF) task total scores are widely used in language attrition studies, but they do not provide insight into the processes underlying optimal performance. We analyse the efficacy of clustering (subcategories within a category) and switching (shifting between these subcategories) strategies in phonemic (PVF) and semantic (SVF) tasks.…

The contribution of linguistic skills to reading has been reported in different languages; however, this contribution varies according to the specific features of each language. Arabic is characterized by diglossia, i.e. the existence of two distinct varieties: Spoken Arabic (SpA) and Standard Arabic (StA). This study examined the extent to which…

This quantitative exploratory causal-comparative study investigated the relationship between public and private K-3 schoolteachers' perceptions of their pedagogical content knowledge and instructional practices of phonemic awareness and phonics, the two best predictors of reading comprehension proficiency. Gough and Tunmer's (1986) Simple View of…

The International Literacy Association (ILA) maintains that phonological awareness has a critical role in early literacy and language development. Purposeful, efficient, and developmentally appropriate instruction in phonological awareness can support young children's literacy and language development and help them understand how to decode and…

This study investigated whether the phonological representation of a word is modulated by its orthographic representation in case of a mismatch between the two representations. Such a mismatch is found in Persian, where short vowels are represented phonemically but not orthographically. Persian adult literates, Persian adult illiterates, and…

This national implementation study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of Tier 2 structured literacy teaching set within a multi-tiered system of support. Case-controlled matching was used to determine the impact of the implementation for 1,265 5-year-old children. One comparison group included 1,265 children who were matched to the experimental…

This dissertation investigated the extent to which five dependent variables were included in the first-grade reading curriculum and whether district size played a role in their inclusion. This study's mixed-methods approach incorporated descriptive statistics, histograms, confidence intervals, and chi-squared analyses to assess curriculum patterns…

Kindergarten reading screening measures typically identify many students as at risk who later meet criteria on important outcome measures (i.e., false positives). To address this issue, we evaluated a gated screening process that included accelerated progress monitoring, followed by a simple goal/reward procedure (skill vs. performance assessment,…

Teachers' knowledge of foundational reading skills (e.g., phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension) and the impact of this knowledge on the ability to provide effective reading instruction has been a topic of interest in teacher preparation for decades. Given the number of students with disabilities with significant…

Improving the reading achievement of U.S. students is a long-standing challenge, and there is a growing recognition that some prevalent methods of early reading instruction might be drivers of low reading achievement. In response to low reading test scores and an increasing body of scientific knowledge on how young children learn to read--the…

A phoneme-detection task shows that listeners of Sepedi use semantic information in processing but not prosody (Experiment 1). Sepedi is a language with no grammaticalised prosodic expression of focus. Sepedi listeners detected phoneme targets faster when the phoneme-bearing words were focussed (as opposed to unfocussed) but not when occurring in…