A focus of the Common Core State Standards/English Language Arts (CCSS/ELA) is that students become increasingly more capable with complex text over their school careers. This focus has redirected attention to the measurement of text complexity. Although CCSS/ELA suggests multiple criteria for this task, the standards offer a single measure of…

Promoting literacy development was not a priority for early childhood special educators 25 years ago. The turn of the century gave rise to a scientific basis of reading that outlined what skills need to be taught to facilitate literacy achievement. Steady progress has been made in moving early childhood education to teaching the skills that are…

Delivering high-quality reading instruction to English language learners (ELLs) in the early grades is one of the most challenging issues facing schools. The report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth (NLP; August & Shanahan, 2006) defined "English language learners" as students who come from language backgrounds…

Split fovea theory proposes that when the eyes are fixated within a written word, visual information about the letters falling to the left of fixation is projected initially to the right cerebral hemisphere while visual information about the letters falling to the right of fixation is projected to the left cerebral hemisphere. The two parts of the…

As many studies have now demonstrated that morphological awareness contributes to students' literacy development, there is growing interest in the educational value of instruction in morphological awareness. This review was undertaken to integrate findings of studies that sought to determine whether such instruction contributed to improvement in…

Recent research has found that sensitivity to linguistic stress is related to phonological awareness and reading development. This study investigated the roles of two types of linguistic stress sensitivity (lexical and metrical stress) in the phonological awareness and reading development of young children. Forty-five kindergarten children were…

Explicit strategy instruction combined with student-directed self-regulation in conjunction with cognitive strategies has proven effective in supporting low-achieving students' reading comprehension. Experts have extended 1 such approach, self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) for the expository reading comprehension Think before reading,…

This study examined the relationship among word reading efficiency, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension for adult English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Data from 185 adult Chinese EFL learners preparing to take the Test-of-English-as-a-Foreign-Language[TM] (TOEFL[R]) were analyzed in this study. The participants completed a…

One-to-one music lessons are a common and effective way of learning a musical instrument. This investigation into one-to-one music teaching at the secondary school level explores the teaching of musical expression by two instrumental music teachers of brass and strings. The lessons of the two teachers with two students each were video recorded…

This is a literature review of studies and articles surrounding the issue of literacy strategies for adolescents in high school who continue to struggle with reading. It is also a review of research about where literacy interventions should take place and what obstacles may keep the strategies from either being effective or serving the best…

Parents can play an important role in assisting their children to learn to read, and can act as good role models in promoting reading behaviour. While there has been a raft of research on the impact of parents as teachers, there has been little empirical analysis on the impact of parents in modelling reading. Addressing this gap in the literature…

The purpose of this paper is to construct a comprehensive review of the research literature in the reading of western staff notation. Studies in music perception, music cognition, music education and music neurology are cited. The aim is to establish current knowledge in music-reading acquisition and what is needed for further progress in this…

Initially, the author began her teacher inquiry project by focusing on the superhero play she had been observing in her classroom and on her concerns about how it might be impacting the classroom community. Through an ongoing process of self-reflection and reading research, she was able to open herself up to interacting and engaging with the…

It is well documented that ELLs face significant challenges as they develop literacy skills in their second language (NCES, 2007, 2011). This population is diverse and growing rapidly in Massachusetts and across the nation (Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2013; NCELA, 2011; Orosco, De Schonewise, De Onis, Klingner,…

The field of literacy education has long been concerned with the question of how to help classroom teachers improve their practices so that students will improve as readers. Although there is consensus on what characterizes effective professional development, the reading research on which this consensus is based most often is small scale and…