Considers the nature of joint (parent-child) pre-school activities in the home, and their potential to contribute to the development of early reading skills. Assesses children on various aspects of phonological awareness, and their receptive vocabulary and short-term memory. Finds that children who engaged in a variety of pre-school, parent-child…

Considers how blind children do not receive exposure to environmental print and do not generally learn to recognize written letters of the alphabet prior to schooling in Braille. Concludes that letter learning is a major contributor to the development of phonological awareness in blind children. Suggests key similarities in the underlying…

Presents three research claims that may have influenced the adoption of rhyme and analogy as part of the National Literacy Strategy. Notes that the three claims are: rhyme awareness is related to reading ability; rhyme awareness affects reading achievement; and rhyme awareness leads to the development of phoneme awareness. Concludes that not one…

Examines the relationship between phonological awareness and musical aptitude in pre-school Turkish and American children. Finds that children in the high musical aptitude group did much better on all tasks than those in the low musical aptitude group, showing that success in manipulating linguistic sounds was related to awareness of distinct…

Reviews all randomized controlled trials of the effectiveness of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on spelling. Suggests that the teaching of spelling by using computer software may be as effective as conventional teaching of spelling, although the possibility of computer-taught spelling being inferior or superior cannot be…

Considers how there is no orthographic analogy effect for words with common end patterns (e.g. beak-peak). Assesses a group of beginning readers' phonological awareness and vocabulary. Indicates that while rime-based analogies seem to be phonological rather than orthographic in nature, beginning readers are able to use an orthographic analogy…

Establishes a suitable composite index which combines speed and accuracy in the measurement of decoding skill. Examines whether speed acts as a confounding factor in the measurement of decoding ability. Sees whether familiarity with the word acts as a confounding factor in the assessment of spelling skills. Indicates that including word-naming…

Shows that English as a foreign language (EFL) students in mainland China believe that their command of English vocabulary plays a crucial role in their reading comprehension. Suggests the final replacement of linguistic knowledge by conceptual or sociocultural knowledge as the top factor that affects their reading comprehension seems to take…

Considers how psychological models of first language (L1) textual comprehension distinguish between expository and narrative texts but are unclear on differences of inference generation between the two types of tests in a second language (L2). Shows that subjects generated more inferences for narrative texts while exhibiting more miscomprehension…

Notes that the prevalence of reading difficulty was 8.2% and it was associated with younger age, males, poverty, less-educated parents, psychiatric disturbance, school failure, poor school attendance, physical ill-health, poor motor co-ordination and impaired vocabulary and visuospatial reasoning. Supports a multifactorial causal model of reading…

Explores issues arising from the long-standing theoretical and empirical attention to reading as a specifiable set of psychological processes, and the consequences of this attention for parents' and educators' deliberations and practices. Concludes that theories of reading need to deal fundamentally with the practices that learners, teachers and…

Argues, based on ethnographic data, that students use their literacy practices to form their identities within, and sometimes in opposition to, the figured worlds of school, work and family. Concludes that many students look to school to provide formal literacy experiences, but find their reading and writing passions at odds with the demands of…

Examines the issues raised by photographs children took of reading in the home as part of a funded research project exploring the gendering of reading in the 7-9 age group. Focuses on the dilemmas the images pose for analysis, and what the images, considered in themselves, can be taken as evidence for. (SG)

Shows how one of his ruling passions, the weather, led a teenage boy to engage in a variety of reading practices (and associated writing practices) in a variety of semiotic modes, drawing in different ways on numeracy knowledge. Concludes by arguing that both research on multi-modality and the New Literacy Studies point in a similar direction:…

Argues the significance of social capital in the literacy learning process and discusses the roles and effects of various elements of social capital, such as networks and trust. Presents an illustrative case study to show how the knowledge and identity resources drawn on during learning interactions rely as much for their success on…