Purpose: This study contributes to the science of teaching reading and vocabulary by illustrating how a ubiquitous classroom practice -- read alouds -- can be enhanced by structured supplements. This experimental study examines whether and to what extent providing structured supplements can improve student comprehension outcomes by helping…

Research has demonstrated the positive effects of systematically teaching phonemic awareness and phonics in kindergarten and first grade, but many commonly used reading curricula do not adequately incorporate these foundational skills. In this study, we examined the efficacy of an instructional program ("UFLI Foundations") in…

Public policies targeting individuals based on need often impose disproportionate burden on communities that lack the resources to implement these policies effectively. In an elementary school setting, I examine whether community-level interventions focusing on similar needs and providing resources to build capacity in these communities could…

Reading tutoring is a traditional technique to support the development of young readers. One relatively popular method of tutoring involves pairing a lower level reader with a higher level reader to synchronously read connected text aloud. We use the term Synchronous Paired Oral Reading Techniques (SPORT) to describe a family of related methods…

Background and Aims: Students with intellectual disability benefit from high-quality instruction in reading and mathematics. Methods: This Theoretical Paper outlines the need for effective, evidence-based instructional practices for this population and the potential for observation research to inform such advancements. We report our systematic…

Teachers understand the importance of think-alouds, yet research shows that think-alouds may be used ineffectively in practice. Often, this results from the difficulty of explicitly sharing the inner thought processes of competent readers and writers in transferable ways for students. To our knowledge, a tool for helping preservice teachers…

During the last decades, prevalence of pupils with Specific Learning Disorder, and more specifically with Dyslexia, is on the increase in Italian schools. It requires both researchers and teachers to investigate, adapt and adopt simplex teaching strategies. that may foster pupils learning process at primary schools by taking account of their…

In this article, the author argues that living literacies--relational, embodied forms of literacy engagement--are an integral component of literacy engagement and hold the potential to disrupt and reconfigure the power structures embedded within schooled literacy. Drawing on affect theory and rhizomatic theory, the author analyzes youths' literacy…

Do children with better reading competence read more, or do avid readers increase their reading competence? This highly relevant question has been discussed for many years, yet conclusive results are rare. Previous studies suffer from small sample sizes or omitted variable bias, rendering their findings questionable. We provide new insight using…

This study employed a single-case design with an AB structure to examine the effect of implementing a Response to Intervention (RTI) model on a fourth-grade elementary school student with reading difficulties. The participant in the study was Deniz, a fourth-grade elementary school student. The pretest measures revealed that Deniz was at the…

Longitudinal studies on mainstream children and training studies in the dyslexic population suggest that visual attention span (VAS) abilities contribute to reading acquisition. We evaluated to what extent VAS training in beginning readers might enhance later literacy skills. A large cohort of 453 children was followed from the beginning to the…

Purpose: Nearly 50 years ago, Durkin (1978-1979) conducted a seminal observation study on reading comprehension teaching in Grades 3 through 6. She reported that teachers rarely taught reading comprehension (less than 1% of instructional time). Since then, we have gained substantial knowledge about teaching reading comprehension. We aimed to…

This article explores the unique contributions of 2nd-grade emergent bilingual (EB) students' talk-turns vs. those of their teacher on students' expressions of comprehension during interactive read-aloud discussions in a pull-out classroom. They engaged in eight video-recorded, interactive read-aloud discussions across four books. This mixed…

School context can shape relative intervention response in myriad ways due to factors, such as instructional quality, resource allocation, peer effects, and correlations between the school context and characteristics of enrolled students (e.g., higher-poverty students attending higher-poverty schools). In the current study, we used data from…

Many studies addressing methods to improve reading comprehension in English Language Learners (ELLs) primarily focus on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples. Unfortunately, ESL teachers in global South regions like Namibia have often been overlooked in this research. This study aims to bridge this gap by…