Bridging the Gap from Research to Practice: Structural Insights and Evidence-Based Strategies for Children with English Word Reading Difficulties
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.64663/aet.95Keywords:
English language system, Evidence-based practices, Phonics instruction, reading difficulties, word recognitionAbstract
This article situates literacy within the context of early childhood education, emphasising its role not merely as a school subject but as a fundamental tool for communication, participation, and agency in modern society. In this era where information and knowledge form the pillars of progress, the inability to acquire foundational reading and writing skills places struggling readers at a profound disadvantage, limiting their capacity to engage with the world around them. As such, the past few decades have seen countless research studies done with the goal of improving literacy abilities of struggling learners. However, despite brain research studies and meta-analyses demonstrating the powerful impact that phonics instruction has on children's reading development, systematic and explicit phonics instruction is not widely or effectively implemented in English literacy instruction or interventions. This is because for reading instruction or intervention to be effective, a strong grasp of the English alphabetic system, phonemic awareness, and grapheme-phoneme correspondences, amongst others, is required. Without this knowledge, instructions or interventions risk being fragmented and confusing for struggling learners. Grounded in a multidisciplinary literature search spanning education, psychology and neuroscience, this article aims to serve as a resource for English language classroom teachers and educational therapists by (1) examining structural features of the English language that contribute to reading difficulties, (2) reviewing models of reading development, and (3) presenting evidence-based strategies to support children with word reading challenges. By promoting the translation of research into instructional practices, the inequity and learning gaps between the disadvantaged children and the more privileged ones can be narrowed. Finally, this paper discusses key implementation challenges by identifying practical implementation barriers and outlines critical directions for future research.
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