The use of culturally relevant material for urban students with special education/reading risk is frequently promoted in the literature; however, the empirical evidence appears limited. This study included eight African American urban second-grade students who scored within the at-risk range on the DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency measure. The students…

This convergent parallel mixed method sought to determine if the reading program increased third-grade student achievement. The research questions of the study examined the reading achievement scores of third-grade students and the effectiveness of McGraw-Hill Reading Wonders™. Significant differences were observed when a paired sample t test…

This article addresses 3 broad challenges of assessment in reading comprehension: (a) explicitly articulating the knowledge and skills students need to recognize and be able to use in comprehending complex texts; (b) understanding how knowledge and skills progress and successively deepen and develop over repeated opportunities to engage in tasks…

Many of us are plagued by negative memories of sustained silent reading. In some of these memories, we are the students, attempting to read a book that didn't hold our interest or trying to read over the din of our disengaged classmates. In other memories, we are the teachers, suffering through a ten-minute classroom management nightmare, deciding…

The "Lindamood Phonemic Sequencing"® program is designed to improve reading and spelling skills by teaching students the skills needed to decode and encode words and to identify individual sounds and blends in words. The WWC has updated its 2008 review of "Lindamood Phonemic Sequencing"® to include 16 new studies, two of which…

Summer drift, otherwise known as loss of reading comprehension skills or reading achievement, has been a well-known and well-documented phenomenon of public education for decades. Studies from the late twentieth century to the present have demonstrated a slowdown in summer drift attributed to specific summer reading programs addressing motivation…

In this article, we review the skills that have been found to be related to good story comprehension in novice readers with normal hearing and describe the relative weight each plays. The relationship between effective story comprehension and lower level skills (such as syntactic awareness and vocabulary knowledge) is considered, and the casual…

This study quantified the orthographic knowledge (i.e., knowledge of spelling conventions) of school speech-language pathologists (SLPs). On average, SLPs (N = 48) answered 65% of the questions correctly on a measure of orthographic knowledge. SLPs need better preparation in written language structure to support reading acquisition in children…

This article reports the results of a qualitative study of the effectiveness of a critical reading instructional intervention based on teacher/student conferencing (TSC) and differentiated instruction (DI) in improving the participants' understanding and evaluation of published educational research. TSC and DI entailed using a subset of teaching…

Creating Habits That Accelerate the Academic Language of Students (CHAAOS) is a vocabulary intervention developed by O'Connor et al. to improve the academic vocabulary of middle school students with disabilities. This study was designed as a replication of O'Connor et al.'s study; CHAAOS lessons were taught to 33 sixth graders who received special…

This study set out to investigate the relationship between L2 vocabulary knowledge (VK) and second-language (L2) reading/listening comprehension. More than 100 individual studies were included in this meta-analysis, which generated 276 effect sizes from a sample of almost 21,000 learners. The current meta-analysis had several major findings.…

In "To Young Men," Basil of Caesarea asserted that pagan literature could be read discerningly for the pursuit of virtue. As a professor of English, I recognize Basil as an exemplar pedagogue in my own insistence that Christian students read secular texts. Not a scholar of Greek, I rely on patristic scholarship to understand Basil's…

With a growing population of emergent bilingual learners in the United States, we are seeing more emergent bilinguals qualifying for special education services. Special education teachers must be prepared to meet the linguistic needs of their students in addition to disability related needs. One way of doing so involves adopting Culturally…

It is shown that a particular class of pauses taken in both read and composed speech obey allometric laws such that mean pause length predicts body size. The pauses in this class have durations that roughly span 250 ms to 1,000 ms and are taken to mark grammatical and prosodic boundaries. A theory of pause allometry is developed based on the…

This study explored the role of word knowledge dimensions in second language (L2) word-meaning inference. College-level L2 learners (N = 121) participated in this study and completed a series of word knowledge tests including vocabulary size, word associates, morpheme-form knowledge, morpheme-meaning knowledge, morpheme discrimination, and…