Effective learning and classroom interaction depend on learners' reading skills. In essence, reading is the cornerstone of academic success. Thus, functional literacy enhances learners' abilities irrespective of their intellectual abilities. Learners with intellectual disability will have an improved ability to understand and apply the information…

The purpose of this research study was to investigate pedagogical approaches for improving reading compliance and critical, insightful discussion in the higher education classroom. Research on reading compliance in higher education reveals that students are often not reading their assigned texts. This problem compounds when instructors attempt to…

Instruction in regular letter-sound relationships is a key element of teaching children to read. However, in the English language, many words have irregular spellings (e.g. "said," "are," "yacht"). What is the best way to help children learn to read these words? To date, a number of different viewpoints have been put…

T R ('Tim') Miles (1923-2008) was one of the most important pioneers of dyslexia research and treatment in the UK. He worked with dyslexics from the time of his appointment to a lectureship at Bangor in 1949 and later, with his wife, established the Dyslexia Centre there. Miles' professional role and theoretical contribution are reasonably well…

Drawing on the literature on infrastructure for implementing instructional improvement, the authors explain the role of three infrastructural pillars for reading instruction. They discuss how curriculum, professional development, and leadership are mutually supportive, thus illuminating the pillars for reading reform at the classroom, school, and…

Research is needed to address the possible benefits of blended learning as a form of reading instruction in elementary schools. Blended learning combines teacher-led instruction with digital technology. We had an opportunity to evaluate the effects of blended learning for students in kindergarten through fifth grade within a charter school…

Reading is a crucial skill for students to develop, not only as they enter school but also as they continue throughout K-12 education. Computer-assisted instruction (CAI) is one means of providing supplemental support for students to build the foundational key areas of reading--so they can use reading to learn in later schooling years. One such…

A group of words, labeled the core vocabulary, can be expected to be prominent across all texts. Scholarship made possible by digital databases of words and new analytic systems has shown that approximately 2,500 morphological families account for most of the words in texts--an average of 91.5% of all words in the Common Core State Standards…

English vowels are phonologically and orthographically more difficult than consonants when learning to map speech to print. We sought to determine if teaching young at-risk readers and spellers to use a visual vowel hand sign system to segment spoken words into their component phonemes contributed to improved grapheme-phoneme correspondence…

Purpose: This 2-year longitudinal study examined the unique prediction of a dynamic assessment (DA) of character decoding on Chinese early reading development, and further explored whether learning potential, as assessed by DA, predicts subsequent character reading development in a sample of 135 native Mandarin-speaking Chinese students from first…

Reading and writing instruction involve teachers guiding students to take on the actions and thinking processes of readers and writers. Think-alouds and write-alouds are research-supported strategies that promote student growth and achievement. Although professional development strategies are outlined in the research literature on using…

With the rise of the digital age and social media in the 21st century, our language learners as readers are constantly exposed to a surge of textual information daily. Inevitably, there has been a pressing need for language teachers, particularly in the EFL context, to consider higher-level comprehension and reading skills that help prepare their…

Prior studies suggest that teaching reading strategies promotes reading comprehension in adolescents who have difficulties with reading comprehension, yet the results of those studies are mixed. Individual differences in students' vocabulary knowledge may explain these mixed results. This article examines to what extent vocabulary knowledge…

Students with learning disabilities in word-level reading typically require explicit, systematic, and intensive phonics intervention. Teachers' capacity to provide effective intervention depends largely on their depth of understanding of language and their proficiency with evidence-based instructional methods. This article outlines the key…

Data-based instruction (DBI) is a process of collecting and using student progress data to guide decision-making related to intervention intensity and individualization for students with learning disabilities (LD). However, effective DBI requires that teachers have a range of knowledge and skills across multiple domains. Past research has shown…