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Study 1
Since the late 1970s there has been growing interest in the role of phonological awareness in the development of children’s reading. However, the precise nature of the phonological training required to improve reading is not entirely clear. This study therefore...
Study 2
This study was prompted by the debate over the most appropriate phonological unit to teach beginning readers. While developmental theories promote the role of large-units such as syllables and onset and rime, instructional theories advocate the use of small-units...
Study 3
This study examined the role of early reading instruction on the nonword reading strategies employed by beginning readers. Three groups of children given different styles of reading instruction were asked to read a list of nonwords presented (i) in isolation and (ii)...
Study 4
The benefit to memory of spacing presentations of material is well established but has rarely been applied in education. This study involved three experiments that examined the spacing effect and its application to education. Experiment 1 demonstrated that spacing...
Study 5
Just as children are able to understand words spoken orally with different accents, when they are reading they are able to understand words which are decoded correctly but may lead to an incorrect pronunciation. For example, if children are taught that the letter...
Study 6
A fiercely contested debate in teaching reading concerns the respective roles and merits of reading schemes and real books. Underpinning the controversy are different philosophies and beliefs about how children learn to read. However, to some extent debates have...
Study 7
The value of teaching high frequency words to beginning readers as part of a ‘sight vocabulary’ (i.e. words read according to their orthography rather than according to their phonology) has been called into question by those advocating an exclusive role for synthetic...
Study 8
A similar article to ‘Optimal Sight Vocabulary’ is being prepared which identifies the optimal phonic skills to teach beginning readers. Researchers have suggested that there as many as 461 different phonic rules to teach. One well known programme teaches 120 and the...
Study 1
This study took place over three academic years in 12 schools (six experimental and six comparison schools) and compared the Optima Reading Programme with schools adopting traditional methods to teach reading prior to the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy...
Study 2
This study took place between over three academic years in 16 schools and compared the Optima Reading with the National Literacy Strategy (NLS). The results from Study 2 were very similar to those in Study 1. Children made better progress when children were taught...