We tested the effects of teaching reading skills through U.S. history content for 38 eighth-grade poor readers whose reading ability ranged from second-to fourth-grade levels. Half of the students received special education services, and half of the students were English language learners. Students were taught to decode multisyllabic words, learn…

Family literacy programs abound today, and many try to be all things to all participating families. Funding has eroded for programs of long length and shorter length programs need a specific focus to aim for a modicum of success. This article provides an overview of the importance of interactive reading for children's future success in school,…

"Literacy Achievement and Diversity" is the indispensable collection to the wisdom of respected literacy researcher Kathy Au. In this timely book, Au addresses the question of what educators can do to close the literacy achievement gap. She begins by outlining theory and research and then provides practical strategies to help teachers improve the…

The purpose of this study was to conduct a quantitative content analysis of the conference session programs from the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers (ALER) annual meetings across five decades spanning from 1960 through 2010. The data cycled through an analysis during four separate phases. In total, 4,605 conference sessions were…

An important goal of research on specific learning disorders (such as dyslexia, or specific reading disability, or dysgraphia, or specific writing disorder) is to elucidate the universal characteristics and cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences of literacy acquisition and disability. However, despite the acknowledged necessity of…

Current theoretical interpretations of naming speed and the research literature on its relation to reading are reviewed in this article. The authors examine naming speed's effects across languages and the shape of its relationship to reading. Also considered is the double-deficit hypothesis, by which students with both slow naming speed and low…

An analysis of large and influential published reviews of research pertaining to the reading acquisition of young struggling readers in the early years of schooling was undertaken. The reviews were selected on the basis that they either had been commissioned by federal governments or had been conducted by reputable research institutions and had…

In the academic world, citations can provide insights into the impact of a particular theoretical orientation on scholarship in a field of study, showing epistemological shifts as numbers of citations to that theory increase or diminish. This study explored the impact of the transactional theory of reading, articulated by Louise Rosenblatt, (e.g.,…

In this review, the authors interrogate the recent identity turn in literacy studies by asking, How do particular views of identity shape how researchers think about literacy and, conversely, how does the view of literacy taken by a researcher shape meanings made about identity? To address this question, the authors review various ways of…

A growing corpus of evidence suggests that morphology could play a role in reading acquisition, and that young readers could be sensitive to the morphemic structure of written words. In the present experiment, we examined whether and when morphological information is activated in word recognition. French fourth graders made visual lexical…

Literacy in Early Childhood and Primary Education provides a comprehensive introduction to literacy teaching and learning. The book explores the continuum of literacy learning and children's transitions from early childhood settings to junior primary classrooms and then to senior primary and beyond. Reader-friendly and accessible, this book equips…

This article examines how a second-grader demonstrates that reading is not about decoding letters and words in linear order but is a more complex activity involving the reader's decisions with respect to several aspects of their knowledge of their language and how comprehension is key to transacting with texts. The paper observes and documents the…

We tested the effects of teaching reading skills through U.S. History content for 38 eighth-grade poor readers whose reading ability ranged from 2nd to 4th grade levels. Half of the students received special education services and half of the students were English Language Learners. Students were taught to decode multisyllabic words, learn…

This manuscript focuses on neuroscience research that may have applicability for early childhood educators. Beginning with cautions about the usefulness of neurosciences, we offer reviews of several ideas that can inform the practice of early childhood educators. We begin with the understanding that reading is not innate, meaning that every brain…

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of aligning classroom core reading instruction with the supplementary reading instruction provided to 133 struggling grade 2 readers. A 2-group, pre-posttest true experimental design was employed in this study. In 11 elementary schools, 12 teachers taught both the aligned and unaligned core and…