This article examines how literate actions of reading texts in academic contexts are characterized in semi-structured interviews with first-year and senior students at a Brazilian federal university. Adopting a social perspective of literacy and an ethnographic perspective, the analysis reveals that the literate action of reading texts is…

This report summarizes Austin Independent School District (AISD) English language learner (ELL) students' performance on the Evaluación del Desarrollo de la Lectura, an assessment of Spanish reading ability, over three consecutive school years. It includes only ELLs who joined AISD in kindergarten in 2012.

An important component of reading comprehension is the reader's capacity to make inferences that can maintain the coherence between propositions within the text. However, the cognitive and linguistic skills that underlie online inference making remain elusive. The authors aimed to clarify the effects of vocabulary and text comprehension on…

The author offers tips for addressing topics of diversity from a social justice perspective through the use of picture books during read-aloud time.

The influence of domain knowledge on reading behavior has received limited investigation compared to the influence of, for example, context and/or word frequency. The current study tested participants with and without domain knowledge of the "Harry Potter" (HP) universe. Fans and non-fans read sentences containing HP, high-frequency…

The present study aimed to examine the potential importance of orthographic flexibility for Chinese reading acquisition. Orthographic flexibility is a novel concept that represents the ability to manage and switch attention among multiple aspects of orthographic information. A total of 92 Chinese kindergarten children at age 6 were assessed on…

Background: Policymakers have debated whether test scores represent students' maximum level of effort, prompting research into whether student-level financial incentives can improve test scores. If cash incentives are shown to improve students' test performance, there can be questions as to whether test scores obtained in the absence of financial…

This study examined distributional statistical learning of positional, phonetic, and semantic regularities of an artificial orthography in Chinese children aged 8-10 years: 29 with dyslexia, 29 age-matched controls, and 30 reading-level matched controls. Despite having positional regularity learning performance comparable to the controls, the…

The authors discuss how teachers can select picture books to fully recognize the lives and identities of refugee-background learners, counter harmful myths, and address forced displacement in their classrooms.

Teacher preparation institutions have been critiqued for insufficient emphasis on the science of reading. The authors argue that although improving early reading success and teacher preparation are both critical issues, today's "science of reading" discourse does not fully capture the complexity of teaching students to read. First, the…

The orthographic choice (OC) task--requiring individuals to choose the correct spelling between a word and a pseudohomophone foil (e.g., "goat" vs. "gote")--has been used as an outcome measure of orthographic learning and as a predictor of individual differences in word reading development. Some consider the OC task a measure…

Christer Ekholm's point of departure in this article is Gert J. J. Biesta's call for a new pedagogical attitude that takes a stand against the current trend in education. At present, the dominant approach is to make what we do in school into something wholly predictable, measurable, and assessable, which (as Biesta argues) misses important aspects…

Experimental measures of working memory that minimize rehearsal and maximize attentional control best predict higher-order cognitive abilities. These tasks fundamentally differ from clinically administered span tasks, which do not control strategy use. Participants engaged in concurrent articulation (to limit rehearsal) or concurrent tapping (to…

Providing high-quality courses is of utmost importance to drive successful learning. This compels course authors to continuously review their contents to meet learners' needs. However, it is challenging for them to detect the reading barriers that learners face with content, and to identify how their courses can be improved accordingly. In this…

Purpose: Speech perception is facilitated by listeners' ability to dynamically modify the mapping to speech sounds given systematic variation in speech input. For example, the degree to which listeners show categorical perception of speech input changes as a function of distributional variability in the input, with perception becoming less…