This report is part of a series of four guidance reports that the EEF has produced on the theme of language and literacy. It focuses on pupils between the ages of 5 and 7 in Key Stage 1. However, it may also be applicable to older pupils who have fallen behind their peers, or younger pupils who are making rapid progress. Separate reports cover…

This guidance report aims to help secondary schools improve literacy in all subject areas. It provides seven recommendations related to reading, writing, talk, vocabulary development and supporting struggling students. Throughout the report, recommendations emphasise the importance of disciplinary literacy. Disciplinary literacy is an approach to…

This report offers seven practical evidence-based recommendations--that are relevant to all pupils, but particularly to those struggling with their literacy. To develop the recommendations we reviewed the best available international research and consulted experts to arrive at key principles for effective literacy teaching. This report is part of…

Recent efforts to motivate parents' involvement in their child's literacy development involve informing parents about how to incorporate literacy development into daily routines. Teacher leadership and communication are critical--the more teachers encourage and assist parents and caregivers in supporting their child's literacy development, the…

The goal of this practice guide is to offer educators specific, evidence-based recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. This guide is a companion to the existing practice guide, "Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade", and as a set, these guides…

Comprehension tests are often used interchangeably, suggesting an implicit assumption that they are all measuring the same thing. We examine the validity of this assumption by comparing some of the most popular reading comprehension measures used in research and clinical practice in the United States: the Gray Oral Reading Test (GORT), the two…

Third and sixth graders read an illustrated story and were presented with either a television or radio version of another story. Across a range of comprehension and memory measures, performance in the radio condition and reading were related, while performance in the television condition and reading were not. (Author/CB)

"Policy Perspectives" presents visiting authors' own views and/or research on issues relevant to schools and communities nationwide. The idea that reading skill is largely a set of general-purpose maneuvers that can be applied to any and all texts is one of the main barriers to our children's overall low achievement in reading, argues…

Reviews the research on how readers or listeners construct mental models of the situation a writer or speaker is describing. Narrative components and spatial models are discussed. (YP)

Intended to illuminate current understanding of how the reader's cognition and language and the text's structure affect the processing of prose, this volume contains articles written by educators, linguists, psychologists, and artificial intelligence experts on issues of comprehension research. The first part of the book examines reading…

The authors reviewed studies on teaching reading comprehension to students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) with a focus on text (academic reading) comprehension and sight word (functional) comprehension. Eleven of 754 studies met the inclusion criteria: participants with ASD, published in English in a peer-reviewed journal, and use of an…

Aimed at improving the methodology used in comprehension research, this paper analyzes the designs and interpretations of intervention training studies and suggests the implications of that analysis for future research. It points out that the typical training approach, deriving data from three sources--comprehension tests administered to older…

Recent literature on individual differences in verbal ability indicates that people demonstrating high verbal comprehension are quicker and more accurate in identifying lexical items, as well as more rapid in parsing sentences. They are not, however, more sensitive to the general gist of a passage, and thus do not respond to priming from context…

Since an author does not provide all critical information, a text is never fully explicit; it demands that the reader/listener supply missing elements in order to form a coherent and logical whole. A study was conducted to explore both the types of responses urban first grade students made when asked to predict a narrative ending and differences…

Designed to assess comprehension of written ambiguous and polysemous structures, this instrument is a series of written statements that include varying degrees and types of ambiguity. In the first part of the test students are asked to identify (from a choice of three) semantically acceptable paraphrases for an initial sentence. Then students must…