Jan 26, 2026 | Foundational Skills
Students’ ability to decode proficiently may depend on how well they teach themselves. According to the extensively researched self-teaching hypothesis, as students decode words that are unfamiliar in print, they match letters to sounds in order to read the...
Jul 13, 2022 | Foundational Skills
Along with being taught how to sound out words, students should be taught, from the earliest stages, the morphology of words. As I noted in the last blog, being aware of the underlying morphemic structures of words aids both reading and writing. For the word does,...
May 11, 2022 | Foundational Skills
Morphology: A Key Foundational Skill Initially, students are taught to use phonological information to read words. This works well for words such as hat and pet, which have spellings that are easily...
Apr 6, 2022 | Foundational Skills
Better Start Literacy The Better Start Literacy Approach has been highly successful in developing the literacy of year 1 (kindergarten) students with low language in New Zealand. Students provided with Better Start outperformed students taught with the schools’...
Nov 6, 2020 | Foundational Skills, Instruction
As they progress through the grades, most students eventually learn phonics and become adept at deciphering single syllable words. However, a significant number of students have difficulty applying their knowledge of phonics to multisyllabic words. Alicia is a...
Oct 14, 2020 | Foundational Skills
I have just published Beginnings, the last component of Building Foundational Literacy, an intervention program that includes provision for the most severely disabled readers. Building Foundational Literacy is a revision of Word Building, which has been used in...
