Many middle school students with disabilities struggle to read fluently and express comprehension of entire passages. This is because they comprise a population of students who continue to struggle to quickly and accurately read single words in isolation, also known as word recognition automaticity. These students often have struggled for several…

When students struggle with reading at the elementary level, their needs are typically met with interventions that focus on word recognition and decoding skills. This same intervention approach is often used to address students who struggle with reading at the middle-school level. The middle school struggling reader accumulates deficits from…

Some students still reach secondary level schooling without proficient foundational reading skills. Students who struggle to decode words accurately and efficiently will fail to adequately access grade-level texts independently, furthering the gap between themselves and their peers. Despite a subgroup of students reaching high school with word…

Middle school is often the last place where students are taught basic reading skills such as phonology, morphology, fluency, and comprehension before they move on to high school where reading is predominately focused on understanding, analysis, application and evaluation of content area material. In addition, middle school students are exposed to…

Success in school and future participation in college and workplace environments depend upon attaining proficiency in reading (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices [NGA], Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). Proficient reading entails decoding printed words and comprehending their meaning (Hoover & Gough, 1990).…

The purpose of this study was to examine the dually implicated processes of language and self-regulation in reading comprehension and to determine if self-regulation contributes unique variance to reading comprehension beyond word recognition/decoding and oral language comprehension. The study also sought to determine if the unique contribution of…

In the past century, French has shifted from being the native language of many Louisianans to being an endangered dialect. Since the creation of the state agency CODOFIL (Council for the Development of French in Louisiana) in the 1960's, efforts have been made to revitalize French in Louisiana, and since the 1980's, some parishes have offered…

Morphological skills have been associated with performance on multiple literacy outcomes. While growth in derived word knowledge has been documented during mid-elementary grades, little research has studied the development of knowledge of specific morphemes, separate from whole-word knowledge. This study examined the development of knowledge of a…

The goal of this study was to determine potential causes for the reading and spelling discrepancies of 26 middle school students. All were proficient in reading, but non-proficient in spelling, a pattern typical in students with Specific Spelling Disability (SSD). The focus of the study was on linguistic knowledge while encoding and decoding, plus…

Students diagnosed with autism demonstrate a deficit in communication skills, which affects their literacy skills. Federal legislation mandates that students with disabilities receive a free appropriate public education, be taught how to read, and have access to the general education curriculum. Students with autism are being included more in the…

High opportunities to respond (OTR) have been touted as being a key factor in a popular and effective drill procedure called incremental rehearsal (IR). However, IR has also been criticized because it takes more instructional time than other drill procedures and can be less time efficient. The current study compared the effectiveness and…

This mixed method study examined the use of repeated reading with eighteen, eighth grade special education and regular education students. The purpose was to study use of repeated reading's structured, systematic, oral reading intervention while also seeking to further analyze LaBerge and Samuels' "Theory of Automaticity"…

This study investigated the differential contribution of auditory-verbal and visuospatial working memory (WM) on decoding skills in second- and fifth-grade children identified with poor decoding. Thirty-two second-grade students and 22 fifth-grade students completed measures that assessed simple and complex auditory-verbal and visuospatial memory,…

Although literacy skills have been associated with critical academic, social, and economic outcomes, most adolescents in the United States lack basic proficiency in reading comprehension. Experts in the field of adolescent literacy have identified affective components of reading (e.g., reading attitudes) as a critical topic in need of further…

This study investigated some of the underlying factors that may relate to and predict the reading comprehension of children in fourth through eighth grade (N = 47). A subset of these children previously had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD; n = 10); the remainder are classified as typically-developing (n = 37). The participants…