Vowels in Spanish have direct one-to-one letter-sound correspondences, whereas vowels in English usually have multiple spellings. For native Spanish-speaking children learning to spell in English, this transition from a shallow to a deep orthography could potentially cause difficulties. We examined whether the spelling of English vowel sounds was…

Microsoft PowerPoint software is widely used in business and higher education and is growing in use with school-aged students. A small body of research has demonstrated that it can be effective in enhancing skill instruction for individuals with disabilities. PowerPoint is not a difficult program to learn, but it provides endless possibilities for…

It is typically assumed that when orthography is translated silently into phonology (i.e., when reading silently), the phonological representation is equivalent to the spoken form or, at least, the surface phonemic form. The research presented here demonstrates that the phonological representation is likely to be more abstract than this, and is…

A 2-year longitudinal study was carried out to test the hypothesis that children's word-specific learning of inflectional spellings is an essential first step in their acquiring an understanding of morphological rules for spelling inflections. Ninety children, who were 6-years-old at the start of the project, were asked to spell pseudowords and…

According to the Lexical Restructuring Model (Metsala & Walley, 1998), children move from holistic representations of words, to syllabic representations, and finally to phonemic representations through a restructuring process driven by their developing lexical base. In contrast, the psycholinguistic grain size theory put forth by Ziegler and…

This study investigated the efficacy of an instructional training module focused on alphabetic principle, more specifically, the speech sounds of English on letter-sound knowledge of preservice teachers enrolled in elementary or special education teacher certification programs. In addition, this study examined preservice teachers' ability to apply…

The importance of early literacy instruction and its role in later reading proficiency is well established; however, measures and procedures to screen and monitor proficiency in the area of early literacy are less well researched. The purpose of this study was to (a) examine the technical adequacy and validity of early curriculum-based literacy…

The relationship between written words and their pronunciation varies considerably among different orthographic systems, and these variations have repercussions on learning to read. Children whose languages have deep orthographies must learn to pronounce larger units, such as rhymes, morphemes, or whole words, to achieve the correct pronunciation…

This study includes a spelling inventory and attitude survey that were administered to pre-service education undergraduates. Analyzed using traditional performance levels as guidelines, no students scored at an independent level, 71% scored within an instructional level, and 29% scored at a frustration level. Inventory results and survey comments…

The current study investigates the phonemic awareness and nonword processing of English as a foreign language students from Hong Kong and Mainland China, with reference to factors considered the main facilitators of phonemic awareness: written language experience, spoken language experience, and metalinguistic training. The Mainland Chinese…

An investigation was conducted into the visual and auditory temporal processing profiles of two groups of 4- to 6-year-old children: "pre-alphabetic" children, who showed no alphabetic ability (failing to read any non-words in a test), and those who demonstrated some alphabetic ability. This "alphabetic" group showed higher scores in reading and…

Federal legislation mandates that local education agencies provide quality, evidence-based supplemental educational services to struggling learners. Nowhere is this more salient than in underperforming schools serving children from low-income backgrounds who are at risk for developing learning problems. The study described in this article…

Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as…

Research suggests that development of the alphabetic principle is a critical factor in learning to recognize words and becoming a successful reader. The alphabetic principle encompasses both the understanding that relationships exist between letters and sounds and the application of these relationships to reading words. This study investigated the…

Background: Both academic research and educational policy have focused on the diverse language resources of young schoolchildren. African American Language (AAL) in particular has a rich history of scholarship that both documents its historical evolution and sociolinguistic complexity and reveals the persistent lack of knowledge about AAL in our…