Objective: The link between significant attention problems and reading difficulties among school-age children is clear, but few have examined the impact of early inattention on preliteracy development. This longitudinal study examines this link. Method: A total of 47 children had repeated measures of teacher-rated attention problems and three key…

This practical guide will help teachers to use the acclaimed "Literacy Through Photography" method developed by Wendy Ewald to promote critical thinking, self-expression, and respect in the classroom. The authors share their perspectives as an artist, a sociologist, and a teacher to show educators how to integrate four new "Literacy Through…

The authors explored "Itchy's Alphabet" as an innovative approach to teaching letter-sound connections through multisensory cues. This is the initial demonstration of this instructional method for increasing students' sublexical skills (letter identification, letter-sound knowledge, and phonological awareness). To examine the effectiveness of the…

It is commonly assumed that orthographical lexical access in visual word recognition takes place in parallel, with all letters activated at the same time. In contrast, in the SERIOL model of letter-position encoding, letters fire sequentially (Whitney, 2001). I present further support for such seriality on several fronts. (1) The reasons that led…

Young children with autism often are identified as experiencing problems in language, social, and behavioral development. Current research typically focuses on these three areas with little attention paid to the academic learning of these children. Because of this, young children with autism often do not engage in typical early literacy…

This article explores early bilingual script writing as an act of identity. Using multiple theoretical perspectives related to social semiotics and social constructivist perspectives on identity and writing, the research presented in this article is based on a case study of an early biliterate learner of Japanese and English from the ages of 3-7.…

This pilot study examined the feasibility of a home-school partnership for improving emergent literacy skills in Spanish-speaking pre-school children of migrant farmworkers. Parents were requested to send labeled drawings of family activities to their children's classroom for supplementing bilingual language and literacy instruction. Participants…

The authors describe how alphabet books teach so much more than just the ABCs. They provide excellent resources, allowing teachers to link and integrate the reciprocal processes of reading and writing. Encapsulated within the writing workshop framework, the authors use multigenre and multicultural alphabet books as anchor texts for a literacy…

Heretofore, we learned that bilinguals better detected letters in inter-lingual homographs when the context language ascribed a content role to the homograph as compared to a function role. In previous work the target homographs appeared in passages that were of a single language. The present work investigated whether this letter detection pattern…

Typical U.S. children use their knowledge of letters' names to help learn the letters' sounds. They perform better on letter sound tests with letters that have their sounds at the beginnings of their names, such as v, than with letters that have their sounds at the ends of their names, such as m, and letters that do not have their sounds in their…

Emergent literacy programs for young children are significantly more effective when caregivers are integral components of program delivery. This is particularly important when designing programs for vulnerable children such as those with lower academic achievement due to learning and language disabilities, lower socioeconomic environments, or…

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…

Preschool-aged children (n = 58) were randomly assigned to receive small group instruction in letter names and/or sounds or numbers (treated control). Alphabet instruction followed one of two approaches currently utilized in early childhood classrooms: combined letter name and sound instruction or letter sound only instruction. Thirty-four 15…

This paper examines how transliteration can be used as a bridge to learning for children who are studying more than one script. The focus is on second and third generation British Bangladeshi children aged 7-11, attending London primary schools and learning to write in Bengali at community-run after-school classes. An action research project…

Longitudinal structural equation modeling was used to evaluate longitudinal relationships across adjacent grade levels 1 to 7 for levels of language in writing (Model 1, subword letter writing, word spelling, and text composing) or writing and reading (Model 2, subword letter writing and word spelling and reading; Model 3, word spelling and…