This paper reports a single case treatment study conducted with R.F.L., a young man with developmental mixed dysgraphia. The intervention focused on teaching spelling rules and was a replication of a previous successful study. The results of the present study provided further insights into the mechanism that operates to update faulty lexical…

Previous studies of visually symptomatic dyslexics have found that their contrast thresholds for pattern discrimination are the same as non-dyslexics. However, when noise is added to the stimuli, contrast thresholds rise markedly in dyslexics compared with non-dyslexics. This result could be due to impaired noise exclusion in dyslexics. Some…

In this study, 180 Norwegian fifth-grade students with a mean age of 10.5 years were administered measures of word recognition skills, strategic text processing, reading motivation and working memory. Six months later, the same students were given three different multiple-choice reading comprehension measures. Based on three forced-order…

This study investigated the effects of dialogic parent-child reading in English on 51 Hong Kong kindergarteners learning English as a second language. Children were pre-tested on nonverbal IQ, reading interest and receptive vocabulary, word reading and phonological awareness in both Chinese and English. They were then assigned randomly to one of…

Early intervention aims to prevent poor literacy outcomes associated with social disadvantage. This study examined whether the short-term positive effect of a preschool classroom-based oral language and phonological awareness (PA) programme was maintained and transferred to literacy 2 years later. The vocabulary knowledge, grammatical skill,…

The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to examine the effect of task-focused behaviour on reading fluency, spelling and comprehension; and (b) to examine the role of the different literacy skills in subsequent task-focused behaviour. Two hundred and seven Finnish-speaking children were followed from preschool until their fourth year at school…

This research explores the impact of flashbacks and changes in settings and narrators on reader comprehension. Individually, 34 fourth graders (9 and 10 years of age), mostly with above average reading abilities (5.0), orally read the first chapter of a novel. Both publisher and readability formulae estimated the text to be at a fourth- grade…

The aim of the present study was to examine the spelling development of Greek-speaking children in the early school grades. Although Greek orthography is regular for reading, it is much less transparent as far as spelling is concerned. Spelling development was investigated using a word spelling task designed to explore the effects of word length,…

This study examined the relative importance of a number of cognitive factors (i.e. working memory, vocabulary knowledge, general cognitive ability and reading skills) in accounting for differences in the rate of progress made by children in the development of emergent writing skills. Sixty-seven children were assessed on tasks measuring the…

Standardised tasks and a repeat design were used to investigate development in narrative writing by 112 primary schoolchildren. The scripts comprised the NFER "Literacy Impact" Writing Test B, completed near the end of the children's second terms in Year 5 and Year 6. The test includes a narrative task using content of appeal to both genders. The…

Particularly in primary school, good performance on copy tasks is an important working technique. With respect to writing skills, copying is a very basic process on which more complex writing abilities are based. We studied the copying ability of second and fourth graders across four types of symbols which vary with respect to their semantic and…

In order to communicate understanding, students are often required to produce texts which present an explicit, coherent argument. This study examined the extent to which individual differences in undergraduates' topic knowledge and working memory skills were related to their ability to revise texts to better fulfil these goals. Forty-seven…

The increasing involvement of fathers in active parenthood raises questions concerning their parenting style. This study compared mothers and fathers in their writing interactions with their young children, exploring how parents' writing guidance related to children's early literacy. Mothers and fathers of 51 kindergarteners were videotaped…

This semi-longitudinal study examined the development of narrative writing quality of young Turkish second language learners in mainstream Dutch-only education, and the impact of student-level and classroom-level predictors of narrative writing quality, using hierarchical linear modelling. Writing samples of 106 third graders and 111 fourth…

From the perspective of the Fuzzy Trace Theory, this study investigated the impacts of concept maps with two strategic orientations (comprehensive and thematic representations) on readers' performance of cognitive operations (such as perception, verbatim memory, gist reasoning and syntheses) while the readers were reading two history articles that…