The present study is a small part of a project that is named Legilexi which includes a screening test where the purpose is to identify children who are at risk of having reading- and writing difficulties. The aim of the present study was primarily to investigate the relationship between phonological awareness and different reading abilities in children in year 1 and 3. A further aim was to contribute to the validation of Legilexi’s screening test. There were 48 children from four different schools that participated in the study, 29 of these children were in grade 1, and 19 were in grade 3. The students in first grade were in the ages of 7;0–8:1 years and the children in third grade were between the ages of 9;1 and 9;11 years. The recruitment of the schools was done in consultation with project managers of Legilexi. In this study the schools were selected throughout a convenience sample, because of Legilexi’s spread throughout the whole of Sweden. Phonological awareness was assessed with UMESOL’s phonological elements; phoneme segmentation, phoneme synthesis, position analysis and segment subtraction. The teachers tested the children with Legilexi ́s test material. The relations between the collected data were later examined together with secondary data from Legilexi. The results showed strong correlations between different aspects of phonological awareness, reading- and listening comprehension. However, ceiling effects were discovered in Legilexi’s subtest phoneme analysis in grade 1. This indicates that the design of the test was too simple for the participating children. The conclusion of the present study was that the results were in line with previous research regarding phonological awareness and early reading development. An important and useful finding was the ceiling effect on Legilexi’s test of phonological awareness

This thesis evaluated a new speech rhythm measure, the Lexical Judgement Task (LJT), by conducting a series of cross-sectional studies. It was examined whether the LJT could be used with children from different age groups, whether associations between speech rhythm sensitivity, phonological awareness and reading skills could be observed and whether speech rhythm sensitivity could predict reading skills cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Study 1 piloted the LJT with 5- to 9-year-old children and assessed the relationship between poor and good readers‟ speech rhythm sensitivity and their reading skills. Analyses showed that poor readers performed lower on the task compared to good readers, indicating that reduced stress sensitivity was related to lower reading proficiency. Examination of the task indicated potential fatigue effects, thus the task was shortened, which resulted in a 12-item tasks that was used through the remainder of the studies. Children between 4- and 11-years old were assessed in three following studies and results showed differential associations between stress sensitivity and reading (related) skills; indicating an involvement of maturation in stress sensitivity‟s development but also highlighting that stress sensitivity is involved in reading skills differently across varying ages. The final study in this thesis examined the longitudinal effect of stress sensitivity on reading skills and it was found that stress sensitivity was not able to account for growth in reading skills, independently from vocabulary or phonological processing skills; although concurrently unique variance in reading skills was accountable to stress sensitivity. Overall, this thesis highlights the importance of stress sensitivity in children‟s reading development, offers supporting evidence for previously found associations between this skills and reading abilities and demonstrates the need to incorporate speech rhythm sensitivity in theoretical reading development models.

This thesis investigated reading and related skills in Chinese children learning English as a second language (ESL) in 279 Chinese twin pairs aged from 3 to 11 years. Children were tested twice, a year apart, with measures of visual word recognition, receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness, phonological memory and speech perception in both Chinese and English and Chinese tone awareness. The thesis was divided into two sections with the first section exploring the phenotypic relationships and the second section estimating the genetic and environmental influences. In the first section, the causal relationships among the five ESL skills were modelled (chapter 4) and the relationships between Chinese and ESL skills were sought (chapter 4). In section two, the univariate heritability (chapter 6), the cross-linguistic genetic overlap (chapter 7) and the stability and instability of heritability estimates (chapter 8) for all skills were examined. Findings have shown that ESL speech perception is important to the development of ESL phonological awareness, phonological memory and receptive vocabulary, in turn, has an impact on ESL reading development. Genes play an important role in ESL and Chinese reading development. The differential environmental effects may be due to the differences in the ESL and Chinese acquisition ecologies.

This is qualitative study that deals with the subject “reading aloud” and how teachers apply it in the school environment. Reading aloud is, in this study, seen as a moment in which a teacher reads out loud to their students. It’s an activity with the aim of developing kids’ reading comprehension and ability to socialize, as well as a shared experience for all. The aim of the study was to examine how five teachers work with “reading aloud” in their classes, what the purpose behind their usage is and if they use activities in connection to it. The study is based on the theory; a sociocultural perspective and the pedagogical method “learning by doing”. I’ve used qualitative interviews as my data collection method. The sample was made up of five teachers in total, and all of them were from different elementary schools. The results show that the teachers that participated in the study had several purposes behind their usage of “reading aloud” in the classroom. The results also show that activities connected to “reading aloud” are used in different ways. The conclusion is that the aims of “reading aloud” varies and that all of the participants of the study use activities in connection to “reading aloud”.

The primary goal of the current study was to investigate the impact of different first language backgrounds on early Chinese reading development by comparing a group of children who spoke a dialect at home and learned to speak and read Mandarin as a second language as soon as they attended Mandarin immersion programs with their Mandarin-speaking monolingual counterparts. The comparison involved five variables, two of which were measures of reading outcomes, word reading accuracy and vocabulary knowledge, and the other three were measures related to processing spoken languages, including rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, and morphological awareness. The study was carried out in two phases. Participants in Phase One consisted of 30 dialect-dominant (DD) and 30 Mandarin-monolingual (MD) children from one kindergarten. Half of them were in their second year (K2), and the other half were in their third year of kindergarten (K3). Participants in Phase Two consisted of 218 dialect-dominant children from the third-year kindergarten to the third grade in one school. The assessments in Phase One were administered from March to April in 2011, and the assessments in Phase Two were administered from May to July in 2011. The current study added to extant literature by yielding several important findings with an under-represented population in Chinese reading research. First, the strong link between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge, which has been documented in previous studies, is now extended to the group of DD children. Second, the current study revealed that in comparison to the MD group the DD group performed significantly poorer on Mandarin morphological construction in K2, indicating an impact of language proficiency in the development of morphological awareness. This impact appeared to affect the DD children's subsequent vocabulary development. Third, the current study showed grade variability in the rapid automatized naming (RAN)-Chinese reading relation and suggested that the component of language proficiency might affect children's rapid naming speed and moderate the relation of RAN to reading outcomes. Limitations of the current study and directions for future research are presented.

The aims of this thesis were to examine the utilisation of various linguistic levels in the oral reading of running texts among Swedish beginning readers, and specifically to question the supposedly predominant role of lower (i.e. sub-lexical) linguistic levels by also examining possible evidence of the utilisation of information at the syntactic or semantic levels, as well as textual context. The investigation is based on a corpus constructed from the oral reading of running texts and includes a number of studies using both quantitative and qualitative error analyses. The analyses confirm that other linguistic levels than the sub-lexical have an impact on reading. This was shown both in the linguistic acceptability of errors and the extent to which errors were corrected depending on linguistic acceptability. Although the natural point of departure seemed to be the graphemic level, analyses revealed that graphemic complexity or word transparency alone could not explain error frequencies. In quite a few cases, qualitative analyses revealed, for instance, that higher linguistic levels or knowledge of the world could explain both why words did and did not result in reading errors. However, phonological quantity appeared to be a major difficulty throughout the study, which is clearly related to the graphemic or phonological level. Some differences regarding the developmental perspective were observed. One study indicated that the readers might develop stepwise regarding their utilisation of various linguistic levels, in the sense that they appeared to rely mainly on lower linguistic levels early in reading development. Later they seemed to be dependent on higher linguistic levels, and ultimately they seemed to be sensitive to, rather than dependent on, higher linguistic levels. An interesting result was that the readers seemed to use different strategies for different kinds of words throughout the investigation, using a direct decoding strategy for frequent words, but using a letter-by-letter decoding strategy for less frequent or graphemically complex words.

En av skolans viktigaste uppgifter är att lära alla barn att läsa. Syftet med denna studieär att belysa och analysera pedagogers utsagor och resonemang om mötet med barn somhar identifierad språkstörning. Vi vill fånga vad som uppfattas vara av betydelse för attstimulera dessa elevers läsutveckling i årskurs 1-3. För att få svar på frågeställningarnahar vi använt oss av en kvalitativ metod med ostrukturerad intervju. I studien intervjuasfem pedagoger med erfarenhet av att arbeta med elever som har språkstörning.Resultatet visar att respondenternas uppfattning om vad som är av betydelse för attkunna stimulera dessa elevers läsutveckling är relationen till eleven, möta eleven pådess nivå, flexibilitet i organisationen, mängden erfarenhet, extern hjälp och samarbetemed föräldrar. Kartläggning hjälper dessutom pedagogerna att följa elevens individuellaläsutveckling och att organisera verksamheten därefter. Språkstörning påverkar elevensläsutveckling, på så sätt att varje nytt moment upplevs som svårt och svårigheternaföljer eleven under skoltiden. Elevens starka sidor och sinnen måste därför tas tillvara iundervisningen för att elever med språkstörning ska kunna tillgodogöra sig läsningbättre. Anpassad, strukturerad, lustfylld språkstimulans i varierande former och elevensegen motivation är av betydelse vid stimuleringen av språkstörda elevers läsutveckling.Grundläggande förutsättningar som pedagogerna framhåller i utsagorna är pedagogensbehov av information inför mötet med dessa elever, betydelsen av språklig medvetenhetoch föräldrars delaktighet. / One of the most important tasks of school is to teach all children to read. The aim of thisstudy is to elucidate and to analyze the statements and arguments, of the pedagogues,concerning meeting with children with identified language disorder. We want to spotwhat is said to be of significance in order to stimulate these students' readingdevelopment in the first to the third grade. In order to find answers, to the questions ofthe issues, we have used a qualitative method with unstructured interviews. In the studyfive pedagogues were interviewed, all of them with experience of working with studentswith language disorder. The result shows that the opinion of the respondents, aboutwhat is of significance in order to stimulate the reading development of these students isthe relationship to the student, to meet on the level of the student, organizationflexibility, amount experience, external help and parent collaboration. With support ofschedules the student’s individual reading development can be followed and the workaccordingly organized by the pedagogues. The difficulties influence their learningthrough the years and primary their reading development. Therefore, the strength of thestudent and the using of the five senses must be taken to heart in the education, in orderto better incorporate reading. Of great importance for reading development, of studentswith language disorder, is tailored, structured and joyful stimulus of the language, inways of variation and also the student’s motivation. Fundamental, as the pedagoguesstress in the statements, is the need of information before meeting with these students,the importance of linguistic awareness and the part taking of the parents.

The purpose of this study is to carry out a follow-up study of the reading stimulating project Arts in Reading. The project was in progress between the years 2007 to 2009 in Sweden and nearly 80 librarians from 57 public libraries participated. The aim of the project was to initiate new methods fot how to stimulate reading for children. The promoters of the project wanted to initiate the use of new art forms in the work for reading promotion, encourage more collaboration with new actors in the culture area, and co-operate more with the children. The aim of the present study is to investigate to which extent Arts in Reading really succeeded in establishing its goals, whether new methods were brought about, and how this work was done. Another aim is to find out how librarians in public libraries work to develop children's reading. The theoretical framework is based on Ragnhild Söderbergh's term inculturation, Elisabeth Björklund's research on how children acquire literacy, and Lev S. Vygotskij's sociocultural approach that analyses how the social context encourages children in their learning process. The method used in the study is qualitative interviews: six librarians that participated in the project were interviewed. The follow-up study suggests that the project Arts in Reading's purpose in many ways has been fulfilled. The results show that new methods have been brought about in Swedish public libraries and that the project inspired new ways for stimulating och developing children's reading. This study is a two years master's thesis in library and information science written at Uppsala university.

<p>En av skolans viktigaste uppgifter är att lära alla barn att läsa. Syftet med denna studieär att belysa och analysera pedagogers utsagor och resonemang om mötet med barn somhar identifierad språkstörning. Vi vill fånga vad som uppfattas vara av betydelse för attstimulera dessa elevers läsutveckling i årskurs 1-3. För att få svar på frågeställningarnahar vi använt oss av en kvalitativ metod med ostrukturerad intervju. I studien intervjuasfem pedagoger med erfarenhet av att arbeta med elever som har språkstörning.Resultatet visar att respondenternas uppfattning om vad som är av betydelse för attkunna stimulera dessa elevers läsutveckling är relationen till eleven, möta eleven pådess nivå, flexibilitet i organisationen, mängden erfarenhet, extern hjälp och samarbetemed föräldrar. Kartläggning hjälper dessutom pedagogerna att följa elevens individuellaläsutveckling och att organisera verksamheten därefter. Språkstörning påverkar elevensläsutveckling, på så sätt att varje nytt moment upplevs som svårt och svårigheternaföljer eleven under skoltiden. Elevens starka sidor och sinnen måste därför tas tillvara iundervisningen för att elever med språkstörning ska kunna tillgodogöra sig läsningbättre. Anpassad, strukturerad, lustfylld språkstimulans i varierande former och elevensegen motivation är av betydelse vid stimuleringen av språkstörda elevers läsutveckling.Grundläggande förutsättningar som pedagogerna framhåller i utsagorna är pedagogensbehov av information inför mötet med dessa elever, betydelsen av språklig medvetenhetoch föräldrars delaktighet.</p> / <p>One of the most important tasks of school is to teach all children to read. The aim of thisstudy is to elucidate and to analyze the statements and arguments, of the pedagogues,concerning meeting with children with identified language disorder. We want to spotwhat is said to be of significance in order to stimulate these students' readingdevelopment in the first to the third grade. In order to find answers, to the questions ofthe issues, we have used a qualitative method with unstructured interviews. In the studyfive pedagogues were interviewed, all of them with experience of working with studentswith language disorder. The result shows that the opinion of the respondents, aboutwhat is of significance in order to stimulate the reading development of these students isthe relationship to the student, to meet on the level of the student, organizationflexibility, amount experience, external help and parent collaboration. With support ofschedules the student’s individual reading development can be followed and the workaccordingly organized by the pedagogues. The difficulties influence their learningthrough the years and primary their reading development. Therefore, the strength of thestudent and the using of the five senses must be taken to heart in the education, in orderto better incorporate reading. Of great importance for reading development, of studentswith language disorder, is tailored, structured and joyful stimulus of the language, inways of variation and also the student’s motivation. Fundamental, as the pedagoguesstress in the statements, is the need of information before meeting with these students,the importance of linguistic awareness and the part taking of the parents.</p>

A predictable alphabet book was proposed as a natural way to observe emergent readers’ attempts to integrate their developing literacy skills and knowledge base, despite not yet having achieved conventional levels of reading. Study 1 examined how accuracy in identifying words in an alphabet book in kindergarten related with emergent skills measured in kindergarten and with subsequent reading ability. One hundred and three children completed tests of phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, vocabulary, and rapid naming in kindergarten and were audiotaped reading an alphabet book with their parent. Reading ability was assessed one year later. Correlations were consistent with previous research identifying phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, vocabulary and rapid naming as significant correlates of emergent reading. Alphabet book accuracy correlated with subsequent reading, and the relative indirect effects of kindergarten phonemic awareness and letter sound knowledge on Grade 1 reading through kindergarten alphabet book reading were significant. Findings supported the conceptualization of how well a child identifies words in an alphabet book as a representation of early skill integration. Study 2 built upon these findings by examining self-reported reading strategies. Siegler’s (1996) overlapping waves model was used as a framework, which emphasizes variability, adaptive choice, and gradual change in children’s problem solving. Ninety-one kindergarteners completed tests of phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and vocabulary, and read an experimentally designed alphabet book having pages of varying difficulty with a researcher twice over several months. Findings supported the three main features of the overlapping waves model. Children reported a variety of strategies across the book and on individual pages within it. They worked most quickly on the easiest pages, reported more strategies on the most difficult pages, and chose adaptively among their strategy repertoire. The number of strategies reported and the number of accurately labeled pages increased over time. The relative indirect effects of phonemic awareness and letter sound knowledge on alphabet book accuracy through the use of graphophonemic strategies were significant. Findings support the application of the overlapping waves model to the domain of reading. Overall, these studies highlight the potential for using typical literacy activities to deepen our understanding of the process of learning to read.