How can we best contribute to our students' reading development and achievement? What are the hallmarks of successful, independent student readers? An examination of reading curricula, reading assessment, and related Federal education policy reveals the ongoing emphasis on the cognitive strategies and skills of reading. The teaching and learning…

In the teaching of foreign language reading, there have been at least three distinctive approaches for communicative competence: grammar translation method, comprehension-questions approach with an emphasis on reading skills and strategies, and extensive reading approach. This paper surveys a selection of recent studies that address important…

Concerns about adolescent literacy continue to be highlighted in regards to the challenges of reading and learning from academic text. Recent efforts to address these concerns have led to an examination of the disciplines and their specialized ways of thinking and using language. In this article I discusses a metalinguistic protocol in a…

"Reading Edge" is a middle school literacy program that emphasizes cooperative learning, goal setting, feedback, classroom management techniques, and the use of metacognitive strategy, whereby students assess their own skills and learn to apply new ones. The program is a component of the "Success for All"[superscript 2]…

Reading provides information across the curriculum. Thus, to the extent that fundamental (i.e., generalizable) reading comprehension strategies can be taught, the benefits should be found in multiple domains. To test this claim, children in the third and fourth grades read by simulating text content using the two-part, embodied "Moved by Reading"…

This article reports the evaluation of a 10-week phonologically-based literacy programme involving 10 children with Down syndrome (DS). At the outset, each child relied on a whole word method of reading with no apparent use of decoding strategies. The reading and phonological skills of the children were assessed twice prior to undertaking the…

Students with learning disabilities (LD) represent a significant proportion of students enrolled in U.S. schools. Research suggests that students with LD in reading benefit from specialized reading instruction, and effective reading instruction can be characterized as explicit, intensive, and systematic. Examples of evidence-based interventions…

Reading in L1 shares numerous basic elements with reading in L2, and the processes also differ greatly. Intriguing questions involve whether there are two parallel cognitive processes at work, or whether there are processing strategies that accommodate both L1 and L2. This paper examines how reading in L1 is different from and similar to reading…

Core reading programs have a tremendous influence over reading instruction in the United States. Federal policies such as Reading First put increasing pressure on schools to implement a core reading program. While core reading programs contain a wide variety of suggested strategies and activities, they may not provide sufficient text or volume of…

Adolescent English language learners (ELLs) with learning difficulties face many challenges when reading in the content areas. In this article, we review what research tells us about how best to support ELLs' reading comprehension and content learning. We draw from recent research syntheses as well as individual studies. We highlight one…

Guided reading is used in classrooms across the country and, while it is fairly new, it is anything but revolutionary. In this article, and in honor of the 50th volume of "Reading Horizons," the authors take a look back at the 50-year history of this practice, provide a definition of guided reading, analyze what caused the practice to…

The relationship between the intentional teaching of reading strategies and the increase in reading comprehension was studied. The Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) reading pretest and posttest scores of 57 subjects were analyzed to see if there was a significant increase in performance after the reading strategies were taught. The study…

"Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction" is a reading comprehension instructional program for grades 3-9 that integrates reading and science through activities and the use of science books during reading instruction. The program supplements a school's standard science and reading curricula and offers instruction in reading strategies,…

The study reviewed in this paper examined the impact of "Collaborative Strategic Reading" ("CSR"), a set of instructional strategies used to build reading proficiency, on the reading comprehension of fifth-grade students. The analysis included 1,355 students from 74 social studies classrooms within 26 linguistically diverse…

The study explored the different influences of roots and suffixes in reading aloud morphemic pseudowords (e.g., vetr-ezza, "glass-ness"). Previous work on adults showed a facilitating effect of both roots and suffixes on naming times. In the present study, pseudoword stimuli including roots and suffixes in different combinations were…