Valdois, S.
CNRS
My purpose will be to provide evidence-based practical advices on what teachers can do to reduce disparities among children in their reading achievement. Identification through longitudinal studies starting in kindergarten of the early cognitive factors that are causally associated with later reading skills provide clues on how to improve the quality of general literacy instruction and guidelines for early targeted interventions. Beyond the importance of the linguistic and phonological factors for successful reading acquisition, I will more specifically emphasize the role of visual and visual attention processing for the development of skilled word recognition. The importance of explicit decoding activities and phonics instruction in beginning reading is well established but I will further emphasize the importance of sight-word development from the beginning of reading instruction. In line with the Response-To-Intervention model, I will promote the use of benchmark measures and monitoring tools to identify the children?s strengths and weaknesses and deliver targeted supplemental interventions when required. Last, accommodations remain as a necessary complementary tool all along schooling.