Living Book--Augmenting Reading for Life, a three-year EU-funded Erasmus + project (September 2016-August 2019), exploited the affordances of augmented reality (AR) and other emerging technologies in order to address the underachievement of European youth in reading skills. The program developed an innovative approach that empowers teachers from…

In May 2016 an Invitational Symposium on the Reading for Understanding (RfU) Initiative was held in Alexandria, Virginia. Co-hosted by ETS and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the symposium brought together 160 state and local education leaders to examine the results of the RfU initiative. The goal of the U.S. Department of…

This article sets out to show how to contextualize CEFR descriptors to fit remedial English reading courses at Japanese tertiary institutions. The courses target incoming students who are typically accepted in the fall of their final high school year, and are offered between the time of acceptance and enrolment in the following April. The paper…

As numerous studies from 1906 on have confirmed, children lose ground in learning if they lack opportunities for building skills over the summer. Nonetheless, summer learning loss comes up but rarely in the national discussion of education reform. By the end of summer, students perform on average one month behind where they left off in the spring.…

The U.S. Department of Education's Promise Neighborhood Initiative (DCPNI) is one of the Obama administration's major antipoverty initiatives and a core strategy of the White House's Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative. It is intended to improve educational outcomes by creating a continuum of school readiness, academic services, and family and…

Akins High School is the newest and second largest high school in the Austin Independent School District in Austin, Texas. This report describes how the school has used small learning communities and the "HSTW" framework of Key Practices to improve the school culture, personalize the learning environment, improve student achievement and…

Times are exciting for adolescent literacy research! Researchers are examining adolescents' reading and writing like never before. This department, Research Connections, spotlights scholarly efforts aimed at improving classroom literacy instruction for adolescent learners. It takes a broad, disciplined-inquiry view of research, embracing…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to advance practitioners' knowledge base of best practices in phonological awareness intervention to facilitate the implementation of evidence- or research-based practices in everyday clinical practice. Although most speech-language pathologists (SLPs) have a basic knowledge of phonological awareness, this…

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) program is an oral assessment designed to measure the most basic foundation skills for literacy acquisition in the early grades. EGRA's purpose is to document student performance on early grade reading skills in order to inform ministries…

The practicum report documents the development of a mainstreamed reading program for exceptional children in grades 2-4, and describes its pilot testing with 22 second grade, 21 third grade, and 21 fourth grade students. The specific process and terminal goals of the practicum are presented. The reading program is explained to have included…

This collection of essays examines component areas of constructing a reading curriculum, including the concepts, rationales, and practical aspects that affect curriculum development. The first essay calls for a reading curriculum that incorporates developing proficiency in word recognition and comprehension, and emphasizes quality literature. The…

This report discusses a project aimed at students both developing a positive attitude toward reading and related skills and showing at least a ten month achievement growth on the Stanford Achievement Test in word meaning, paragraph meaning, word study skills, spelling, and language over the pre-analysis survey of the same test. The contents…

This paper reports on a Right to Read summer workshop held for selected classroom teachers. The objectives of the workshop were to provide the teachers with new reading related concepts, techniques, and materials so they could return to their own schools and share their knowledge and attitudes with other teachers. A total of 30 teachers…

Eastern Michigan University's opportunity program for underprepared students, called the Promote Academic Survival and Success (PASS) program, is described. The improvement of the students' reading and writing skills was emphasized. This was seen as the most direct way for the students' to achieve academic competence and self-integration. (MLW)

An elementary education professor taught first grade for a year and developed a balanced program for beginning readers that blended instructional methods from skills-based and holistic perspectives. The program consisted of five complementary parts: teacher read-alouds, sustained silent reading, decoding instruction, shared reading, and writing…