A hallmark of skilled reading is recognizing written words automatically from memory by sight. How beginning readers attain this skill is explained. They must acquire foundational knowledge, including phonemic segmentation, grapheme-phoneme knowledge, decoding, and spelling skills. When these skills are applied, spellings of words become bonded to…

This study addressed the concept of reading instructional level. First, we reviewed the history of the concept, including some recent criticisms of its validity (Schwanenflugel & Knapp, 2017; Shanahan, 2014). Next, we examined, from an instructional-level perspective, the oral reading performance of 248 third graders. We divided the sample…

Quantifying the decoding difficulty (i.e., 'decodability') of text is important for accurately matching young readers to appropriate text and scaffolding reading development. Since no easily accessible, quantitative, word-level metric of decodability exists, we developed a decoding measure (DM) that can be calculated via a web-based scoring…

The relevance of reading prosody on reading comprehension has been theoretically proposed and empirically recognised. The present study aimed to investigate longitudinal and concurrent relationships between reading prosody and reading comprehension processes, beyond decoding and word reading efficiency. Two cohorts of Portuguese children, ranging…

Purpose: To assess strengths and weaknesses of the reading level (RL) match approach and its potential to generate insights regarding the cognitive foundations of reading ability and disability. Method: We applied RL-match design to a sample of 2nd-6th graders reading a consistent orthography, Russian, using an "extreme phenotype"…

As readers struggle to coordinate various reading- and language-related skills during oral reading fluency (ORF), miscues can emerge, especially when processing complex texts. Following a miscue, students often self-correct as a strategy to potentially restore ORF and online linguistic comprehension. Executive functions (EF) are hypothesized to…

Studies investigating individual differences in reading ability often involve data sets containing a large number of collinear predictors and a small number of observations. In this article, we discuss the method of Random Forests and demonstrate its suitability for addressing the statistical concerns raised by such data sets. The method is…

We evaluated the effects of student characteristics (sight word reading efficiency, phonological decoding, verbal knowledge, level of reading ability, grade, gender) and text features (passage difficulty, length, genre, and language and discourse attributes) on the oral reading fluency of a sample of middle-school students in Grades 6-8 (N =…

Describes and discusses two types of oral reading responses that can be identified by a speaker of English, pseudo reading and meaningful oral reading. Also speculates on an explanation of how these responses might be generated. (TO)

The miscues of 22 blind braille readers ages 6-21 were analyzed using Goodman's Reading Miscue Inventory, and compared to those reported for sighted readers. Results revealed greater similarities than differences. For example, print and braille readers had approximately the same proportion of miscues in substitutions, omissions, and insertions.…

Discusses the basic precepts of the Reading Miscue Inventory as an evaluation of oral reading. (TO)

The relationship between the reflection-impulsivity dimension, a dimension of cognitive style, and selected aspects of oral reading behavior was investigated in this study. Fifteen impulsive and fifteen reflective average readers were selected from a population of 109 second graders. Measures of intelligence and reading comprehension were…

Tests the hypothesis that readers who differ in comprehension ability and are similar in their ability to decode single words differ in their ability to read words in sentence context. (FL)

This article discusses ways of analyzing errors made in oral reading; interpreting mistakes in the correct way enables the teacher to understand why the reader is making them and to help overcome the reading difficulties they indicate. (JD)