To make progress in improving students' reading comprehension, we need to rethink the very nature of reading comprehension -- it's not a skill and it requires background knowledge. James Kim and Mary Burkhauser explain that, to help students apply what they learn from one reading task to another reading task, educators should consider developing…

The science of reading emphasizes explicit skills-based reading instruction to support students' reading acquisition. Yet, despite ample evidence of support, some students do not respond to such instruction adequately. To characterize why some students are not responsive to evidence-based reading instruction and to inform the development of novel…

The spread of digital technology has prompted an increase in the amount of written text that gets produced and disseminated daily, together with a diversification of reading contexts and purposes. In this article, we propose that modern reading increasingly relies on readers' ability to set up and manage their own reading goals and decisions. We…

District leaders in a large urban school district in central Florida wanted to test the efficacy of a new curriculum designed to enhance the word knowledge of grade 5 students so as to improve reading achievement. The new curriculum, called Word Knowledge Instruction (WKI), consists of 15-minute lessons taught 4 days a week for 20 weeks. The…

Purpose: This clinical focus article will highlight the importance and role of morphological awareness (MA) across orthographies, in particular, the role it plays in reading development, specifically with bilingual populations. MA supports reading acquisition and development beyond other predictors of reading, such as phonological awareness,…

Many American students struggle to perform even basic comprehension of text, such as locating information, determining the main idea, or supporting details of a story. Even more students are inadequately prepared to complete more complex tasks, such as critically or analytically interpreting information in text or making reasoned decisions from…

The Effective Instructional Strategies Series is a collection of six booklets based on the components used in Pacific Communities with High-performance In Literacy Development (Pacific CHILD), a principles-based professional development program consisting of research-based teaching and learning strategies proven to help improve students' reading…

Students need a strong foundation in reading, writing, math, and numeracy to be successful in GED preparation, in work readiness programs, and in post-secondary education and training. The resources in the Basic Skills Collection that will assist in providing this foundation include research articles, materials and curriculum based on research,…

Presents an essay that is the result of group-centered activities by graduate students and a faculty mentor in a leadership training program for prospective educational administrators in California. Notes that the class produced some forward-moving and future-thinking core recommendations for reading improvement and achievement in multicultural…

The Wisconsin Design for Reading Skill Development (WDRS) is primarily an instructional management model in reading, which can be used in both English and bilingual classrooms. The Design, which presents an objective-based, skill-centered approach to reading instruction, conforms to the concept of individually guided education. It is organized in…

Describes the Directed Reading-Writing Activity (DRWA) as a framework that helps high school students write about the information they acquire through reading. Discusses how the DRWA's three steps--preparation, involvement, and reaction--extends the thought processes associated with reading comprehension into effective writing. (AEW)

This article reports on an introspective study that examined the relationship between first language L1; Farsi lexicalization of the concepts represented by the second language L2; English target words and learners' inferencing behavior while reading English texts. Participants were 20 Farsi-speaking university students of English as a foreign…

Evaluates strategies undertaken to improve students' foreign language reading competence. The article focuses on the ability of pupils to cope with reading texts containing unknown vocabulary, students' motivation to overcome difficulties in comprehension, the best methods to attain a permanent vocabulary gain from reading, and the transfer of…

The Job Skills Educational Program (JSEP), currently under development for the Army Research Institute, embeds learner strategies training within the context of a basic skills computer-assisted instruction curriculum. The curriculum is designed for low-ability soldiers, and consists largely of instruction in the domain of intellectual skills. An…

In response to the assessed need for improving the basic academic skills of United States Navy personnel, a project was undertaken to develop a relevant remedial reading workbook for Navy recruit training commands (RTCs). The workbook was designed to augment existing commercial nonmilitary oriented remedial reading materials that were being used…