Teaching Spelling: An Opportunity to Unveil the Logic of Language

Moats emphasizes the importance of spelling knowledge and language understanding in literacy development in this article. It highlights that spelling is not just about memorizing letters but involves various language aspects like pronunciation, spelling, meaning, and grammatical structure. Good spellers possess comprehensive mental images of […]

Reading Comprehension Development and Difficulties: An Overview

In this International Dyslexia Association Perspectives article, Kate Cain explores the topic of reading comprehension and how language skills develop. The article explains how vocabulary acquisition, understanding of sentence structure and how sentences work together, the ability to infer and integrate information, and building a […]

Supporting Reading Comprehension Development

In this International Dyslexia Association Perspectives article, authors Jane Oakhill and Kate Cain explore the factors supporting reading comprehension beyond basic decoding and suggest critical skills that should form the core of literacy instruction and interventions to support poor reading comprehension. The article outlines which […]

Printable Cards for Irregular “Heart” Words

Contrary to popular belief, students should not be taught to memorize irregular words by sight. In most irregular words, only one or two letters do not conform to their usual sound correspondence. This means that most irregular words are at least partially decodable. This is […]

A New Model for Teaching High-Frequency Words

Often, high-frequency words are called « sight words » with the expectation that these words are irregular and must be memorized. Integrating high-frequency words into phonics lessons allows students to make sense of spelling patterns for these words. To do this, high-frequency words need to be categorized […]

Elkonin Boxes

Elkonin boxes build phonemic awareness skills by segmenting words into individual sounds, or phonemes. To use Elkonin boxes, a child listens to a word and moves a token into a box for each sound or phoneme. In some cases different colored tokens may be used […]