Barbara R. Foorman

TL;DR: First and 2nd graders (N = 285) receiving Title 1 services received 1 of 3 kinds of classroom reading programs: direct instruction in letter-sound correspondences practiced in decodable text (direct code); less instruction in systematic sound-spelling patterns embedded in connected text (embe).

TL;DR: From different sources of evidence, two inescapable conclusions emerge: Mastering the alphabetic principle is essential to becoming proficient in the skill of reading, and methods that teach this principle directly are more effective than those that do not.

TL;DR: This article assessed the relative importance of multiple measures obtained in a kindergarten sample for the prediction of reading outcomes at the end of 1st and 2nd grades and found that phonological awareness, letter sound knowledge, and naming speed consistently accounted for the unique variance across reading outcomes whereas measures of perceptual skills and oral language and vocabulary did not.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the components of effective reading instruction are the same whether the focus is prevention or intervention: phonemic awareness and phonemic decoding skills, fluency in word recognition and text processing, construction of meaning, vocabulary, spelling, and writing.

TL;DR: Findings suggest that the deficit in functional brain organization underlying dyslexia can be reversed after sufficiently intense intervention lasting as little as 2 months, and are consistent with current proposals that reading difficulties in many children represent a variation of normal development that can be altered by intensive intervention.