In early Finnish reading instruction, hyphens are used to denote syllable boundaries. However, this practice slows down reading already during the 1st grade. It has been hypothesized that hyphenation forces readers to rely more on phonology than orthography. Since hyphenation highlights the phonology of the word, it may facilitate reading during…

The purpose of the study was to examine how disciplinary literacy instruction influenced the quality of science informational text produced by second-grade students (N = 45) using the compare/contrast and the sequence text structures. The instruction took place over eight weeks with two four-week units, and with three 30-minute lessons provided…

We conducted a skills analysis on written expression curriculum-based measurement (WE-CBM) tasks completed by 117 second-grade students. As part of the skills analysis, we scored two WE-CBM tasks (i.e., narrative and expository) for correct and incorrect writing sequences, common writing errors, and sentence structures. Although a majority of…

Daily contextualised sentence dictation was used for Year 2 students to practise, and the teacher to assess, taught spelling concepts, capital letters and full stop usage in an Explicit Instruction (EI) intervention. Conducted in a mainstream setting, it supported all students learning to spell, including those with a learning difficulty (LD) and…

This study integrated reading and bilingual theories to examine the reading behaviors of second grade Latinx students in a Dual Language program. It explored how the students' differing language backgrounds (simultaneous bilinguals and sequential bilinguals who had developed Spanish as a home language) might influence their early reading…

Writing development is understood to be a multidimensional task, heavily constrained by spelling in its early stages. However, most available evidence comes from studies with learners of the inconsistent English orthography, so our understanding of the nature of early writing could be highly biased. We explored writing dimensions in each language…

This paper is about implementing a translanguaging approach to teach reading skills in English with simultaneous bilinguals who speak substantial amounts of Malay and Chinese at home. This new pedagogical approach was tried out with 2nd graders in 3 schools in Singapore: instead of the typical immersion approach to teaching reading skills in…

Finnish ABC books present words with hyphens inserted at syllable boundaries. Syllabification by hyphens is abandoned in the 2nd grade for bisyllabic words, but continues for words with three or more syllables. The current eye movement study investigated how and to what extent syllable hyphens in bisyllabic ("kah-vi" "cof-fee")…

It was hypothesized that prosodic reading facilitates beginning readers' comprehension by allowing them to segment the text into meaningful word groups. Two prosodic features of the oral reading of second-grade students were considered: lack of inappropriate pauses and attention to punctuation. To examine the unique contribution of these features…

Research with adults has shown that the distortion of visual word features, and in particular of the multiletter features within words, hampers word recognition. In this study, "CaSe MiXiNg" was employed to examine the effect of disrupting visual word features on the acquisition of orthographic knowledge in children. During the training, 18…

This paper investigated six to nine year old children's ability to use contractive and possessive apostrophes, the effects of type and token frequency, and the effect of teaching on this ability. Apostrophes provide an interesting opportunity to examine the basis of frequency effects in rule inference, as type and token frequencies dissociate in…

Experienced educator Donna Whyte has compiled her ideas for using film containers in the classroom into "131 Ways to Use Film Containers" so that they can be shared with other teachers. She includes engaging ways to use them in teaching children about word families, sight words, and punctuation marks; skip counting, estimating, and predicting; and…