Automaticity in recognizing the words in a text is fundamental to comprehension. If the number of words readers need to stop and decode exceeds their ability to retain their understanding of a narrative's plot or an expository text's description, their comprehension suffers. The conventional intervention for students who lack the automaticity to…

This study examined the relationship between knowledge of academic vocabulary and reading comprehension in data contributed by 5855 middle school students. Each student completed an academic vocabulary assessment, a standardized reading comprehension test, and one of four types of novel vocabulary-depth measures. "Multiword expressions"…

Studies relating to the vocabulary items within EFL textbooks have revealed a divergence from well-researched wordlists such as the New General Service List (NGSL) (Browne et al., 2013), and the BNC/COCA wordlist (Nakayama, 2022; Sun and Dang, 2020). In Japan, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) recently…

The Hybrid Text Comprehension cloze (HyTeC-cloze) (Kleijn et al. Lang Test 36:553--572, 2019) is a procedure developed for the Dutch language that has been proved to be a valid and reliable measure of text comprehension beyond the sentence level. Given its advantages, including its relatively rapid construction and scoring and performance compared…

Reading comprehension tests involve not only reading passages and answering questions but also making choices such as the test-taking strategy to use, whether to search passages for answers, and where to begin searching. We examined the associations between student characteristics, passage type, test-taking strategies, and students' time searching…

This quantitative, causal-comparative research study investigated whether school configuration has an impact on the reading performance of sixth-grade students by comparing the End-of-Grade (EOG) reading assessment Grade Level Proficiency (GLP) scores of sixth-grade students in K-8 configured schools to sixth-grade students enrolled in 6-8 grade…

The purpose of this study was to examine the efficacy of a graphic organizer for improving the expository text comprehension of adolescent Spanish-English bilingual students with learning disabilities. Students were two females and one male. Using a multiple baseline single case design, researchers taught students to create a funnel map graphic…

Despite the growing interest in incorporating response time data into item response models, there has been a lack of research investigating how the effect of speed on the probability of a correct response varies across different groups (e.g., experimental conditions) for various items (i.e., differential response time item analysis). Furthermore,…

Purpose: This study explores the roles of morphological skills (Morphological Awareness, Morphological-Syntactic-Knowledge,Morphological-Semantic-Knowledge, and Morphological-Orthographic/Phonological-Knowledge), vocabulary (knowledge of definitions, relationships between words, and polysemous meanings), and syntax in contributing to adolescent…

The purpose of this single case design study was to examine the efficacy of using double-bubble Thinking Maps to improve the reading comprehension of middle school Spanish-English bilingual middle school students with learning disabilities. Participants included three female Spanish-English bilingual middle school students with learning…

There have been numerous recent calls in literacy research and teacher education to disrupt the 'struggling reader' label, but a dearth of empirical studies on the topic. This qualitative analysis explores the complex issues preservice teachers (PSTs) faced as they examined young readers' sense-making through a reading assessment assignment. Our…

Background: Morphological awareness (MA) is the awareness and ability to manipulate morphemes, the smallest units of meaning in a language. It is identified as a strong cognitive precursor of word reading and reading comprehension. The current MA instructions are limited to classroom settings and delivered by teachers or experimenters. Few studies…

No two students in grades 4-8 are identical, and many struggle with literacy for different reasons. Using a teacher-friendly, hands-on approach, this eminently practical book walks educators through the nuts and bolts of literacy intervention in the middle grades. Highlights include "North Star" principles to orient instruction, an…

Morphological processing is the use of morphological structure during word reading. This study examined the role of morphological processing in automaticity in word reading processes and asked whether automatic morphological processing made a unique contribution to decoding, oral reading fluency, and reading comprehension outcomes of middle school…

The importance of reading competence has been increasingly acknowledged in the Swedish educational system, not least through the demands for higher standards in reading in all subjects stated in the national curriculum. Still, in the school year 2018/19, approximately 7% of all Swedish pupils did not achieve the learning goals related to reading…