Phonics and fluency instruction are primarily viewed as elementary-centric skills that do not have a place in middle school, which may neglect the usefulness this type of instruction provides to older students. Literacy centers are one method for successfully teaching these skills in a middle school setting. The purpose of this paper is to provide…

Framed by Bakhtinian theories of authoritative discourse and heteroglossia, this study examines perceptions of a Science-of-Reading-based state reading initiative five years into implementation. Using interview transcripts, researchers engaged in polyphonic analysis to bring the voices of teachers, reading interventionists, parents,…

This paper recounts the authors' journey of changing practice from teaching adult literacy to helping other teachers by creating digital and printed learning resources and tutor training materials to support a foundational literacy program designed to help those who teach English speaking adults to read and write.

A meta-analysis was conducted to investigate phonology's role in d/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) children's development of reading, and their ability to access spoken-language phonology. A systematic search of databases and journals identified 27 studies, 7 of which met the inclusion criteria. The included studies, experimental or…

Educational stakeholders are keen to know the magnitude and importance of different interventions. However, the way evidence is communicated to support understanding of the effectiveness of an intervention is controversial. Typically studies in education have used the standardised mean difference as a measure of the impact of interventions. This…

Ofsted's 2021 Curriculum Research Review outlines a language pedagogy predicated on an exclusively cognitivist approach to language learning, which relies on three 'pillars of progression': phonics, vocabulary and grammar. The review makes a brief acknowledgement of the importance of motivational factors, including 'pupils' positive views of…

Increasingly, school psychologists are providing services for English learners (ELs) with basic reading problems, including helping to identify appropriate supplemental instruction to help ELs acquire basic reading skills. The purpose of this paper is to present a review of experimental and quasi-experimental studies reporting on the effects of…

Upon entering high school, students with ID who may be able to read simple texts often have difficulty grasping meaning when required to understand more complex texts. This failure affects their overall academic performance, since at this age, it is no longer just a question of learning to read, but rather of reading to learn, in all disciplines.…

In the high-stakes accountability English educational system, decisions made by government and agencies about curriculum, pedagogy and assessment drive school planning and actions. This paper analyses the drivers for the recent change to French German and Spanish GCSEs and highlights particular areas of the new specification which may damage the…

This article looks at the changes made to examinations in England over recent decades and asks about the politics behind the changes. It considers how increasingly centralised the assessment regime has become, moving from a system where teachers could have a say in how pupils are assessed to a regime dominated by government approved tests. It…

This paper describes the mixed methodology evaluation of the Own-Voice Intensive Phonics (OVIP) programme with 33 secondary students with persistent literacy difficulties. The evaluation involved a quasi-experimental evaluation in which 33 students in years 7-9 in four schools used OVIP over an 8 week period and were monitored at three times for…

Background: Educational interventions are often complex, and their outcomes could be due to factors not focused on in the impact evaluation. Therefore, educational evaluations using a randomised control trial (RCT) design approach need to go beyond obtaining the impact results alone. Purpose: Process evaluation is embedded in the evaluation design…

Students beyond the primary grades who struggle with reading lack basic word attack ability and are thus unable to read new words with accuracy. However, there has been little research that reveals the specific word attack errors students exhibit. In this study, 123 struggling adolescent readers receiving special education services were given the…

The importance of reading skills to academic achievement, job acquisition and future success is well documented. Most of the research on reading interventions focuses on children in primary schools but many children start secondary school with very poor reading skills and schools require evidence-based interventions to support these children. The…

This paper describes a randomised controlled trial conducted with 10 secondary schools in England to evaluate the impact and feasibility of Fresh Start as an intervention to help new entrants with low prior literacy. Fresh Start is a synthetic phonics programme for small groups of pupils, here implemented three times per week over 22 weeks. The…