Recent developments in language acquisition and reading research:The phonological basis of children’s reading difficulties

Abstract

This review examines the convergence of recent developments in the fields of language and literacy development and, in particular, developments relating phonological development to both language and reading development. It begins by examining the issue of how children represent spoken words. In particular, it presents recent work arguing that, throughout early and even middle childhood, children’s representations of spoken words are reorganised as sequences of phonemes. The second section examines poor readers’ phonologicol recoding difficulties and, in particular, the contribution of phonological awareness to early reading success. This section includes an overview of phonologicol awareness training studies in “at-risk” preschool and kindergarten children. The final section examines phonologicol processing difficulties as a common underlying cause of reading dificulties.This section provides a theoretical context for practitioners to understand diverse findings relating performance on a wide range of tasks to children’s reading achievement.

Effective teaching practices for students with and without learning difficulties: Issues and implications surrounding key findings and recommendations from the national inquiry into the teaching of literacy

“…• all children can learn, regardless of their intrinsic and context characteristics; • the teaching of basic skills and their application in higher-order skills is essential to intelligent behaviour and should be the main focus of any instructional program, and certainly prior to student-directed learning activities; and • instruction with students experiencing learning difficulties must be highly structured and permit large amounts of practice (Block, Everson, & Guskey, 1995;Bowey, 2000;Engelmann, 1999). Evidence for the utility of DI for the acceleration of student learning has been well demonstrated in findings from Project Follow Through, the largest and most costly research study in the history of education, in which both constructivist 'student-centred' (or 'student-directed') models of teaching and 'teacher-directed' models were evaluated in terms of student learning gains.…”

Need for systematic synthetic phonics teaching within the early reading curriculum

“…However, this is not typically the case with very early reading materials. Thus, word identification and reading comprehension share 61 -81% of variance in beginning readers (Bowey, 2000).…”

Phonological and syntactic processing and the role of working memory in reading comprehension among secondary school students

“…This literature has tended to focus on younger children, particularly children in the stages of learning to read. A consensus has emerged that phonological awareness is the best predictor of reading ability (Blachman, 2000;Bowey, 2000;Goswami, 2000;Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987;Wagner, Torgeson, & Rashotte, 1994). What has not been extensively explored are whether the various processes identified as being involved in reading function in a consistent manner irrespective of the age-related reading competency of the child.…”