A major conclusion from the last decade of research on children with poor reading performance is that early, systematic instruction in phonological awareness and letter-sound correspondences improves early reading and spelling skills and results in a reduction of the number of students who are reading below grade level. To teach reading to at-risk students and students with learning disabilities, teachers need to have positive perceptions regarding the role of systematic, explicit instruction, as well as knowledge of English language structure. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions and knowledge of general educators at two professional levels toward early literacy instruction for students at risk for reading failure. Unfortunately, our findings are similar to those obtained by Moats in 1994: Many general education teachers, at both preservice and inservice levels, are not prepared adequately for this challenging task.

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This study aimed to explore how children with learning disabilities (LD) perceive their quality of life (QoL) and to compare self‐reports and proxy reports regarding their QoL. Children with LD, their typically developing peers, their parents and teachers responded to the child, parent, and teacher forms of KINDLR Questionnaire for Measuring Health‐Related Quality of Life (Ravens‐Sieberer & Bullinger, 1998). Findings showed that children with LD reported significantly lower QoL scores than those reported by typically developing peers. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) and t‐test results showed that agreement between child reports and parent‐proxy reports was either low or moderate on each QoL dimension. Findings of the study may be used to raise awareness regarding the social and educational needs of children with LD in Turkey.

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In comparison to the large body of research on reading and its underlying processes in the field of literacy acquisition, the number of studies investigating the components of writing has remained rather limited (Treiman, 1993). Given that spelling is a fundamental aspect of the ability to write, understanding the nature of spelling may contribute to improvements in literacy instruction, in particular, for those who experience learning difficulties. The course of spelling development has been mostly studied in English (Ehri, 1986; Frith, 1980;Gentry, 1982;Henderson, 1985), a language known for its opaque orthography. In recent work there appears to be a growing interest to investigate spelling patterns in relatively transparent orthographies such as German (Wimmer & Hummer, 1990) and Czech (Caravolas, Volin & Hulme, 2005). However, only few studies to date have dealt with spelling performance in transparent orthographies such as Finnish (Lehtonen, 2006) and Turkish (e.g., Babayiğit & Stainthorp, 2007;Erden, Kurdoğlu, & Uslu, 2002). The primary purpose of the present paper is to examine spelling development in Turkish across grades 1-3. We compared results obtained from different tasks (e.g., single word, sentence and text spelling tasks based on auditory and visual prompts) based on a comprehensive error categorization. Spelling performance in Turkish is analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively; and the findings are discussed in terms of development of spelling across grades and characteristics of error types according to varying spelling task demands. The most common error type was found to be grapheme substitution, followed by grapheme omission; and auditory prompts yielded more errors when compared to visual prompts, which was an expected outcome. Some implications are made regarding the role of universal processes and language specific characteristics in the emergence of spelling errors.

Teachers have an important role in the achievement progress of students with dyslexia. Therefore, measuring teachers’ knowledge and perception of dyslexia is important. Given that an instrument that measures both teachers’ knowledge and perception of dyslexia is not available, this study aims to develop a scale to measure primary school teachers’ knowledge and perception of dyslexia. Two hundred and one primary school teachers participated in the study, and exploratory factor analysis was conducted to identify the dimensions of the scale and to select scale items. Configural, metric and scalar invariance across gender groups was supported. This study also examines whether teachers’ knowledge and perception of dyslexia differ with regard to their backgrounds. The results showed that there was no significant relationship between primary school teachers’ teaching experience and their knowledge of dyslexia. Also, their knowledge of dyslexia did not differ with regard to other variables of the study. On the other hand, there was a positive, but weak relationship between teaching experience and teachers’ negative perceptions of dyslexia. Primary school teachers who took a course about dyslexia in college had lower negative perceptions of dyslexia than teachers who did not do so. Teachers’ perceptions did not differ with regard to taking an in-service seminar, reading a book or an article or teaching a student with dyslexia. The current study is expected to contribute to dyslexia research in terms of providing a scale to measure teachers’ knowledge and perception of dyslexia.

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