Background: Adapting instruction to individual students' needs is known to be effective, but there is a lack of evidence whether students' reading skills are associated with literacy instruction activities at classroom-level. Both the content of the literacy instruction and teachers' instructional support through instructional management are…

Background: Visual-spatial attention is associated with reading development, but we do not know whether this is primarily driven by the deployment of goal-directed or stimulus-driven attention. Method: One hundred ninety-four Chinese-speaking first graders completed two visual search tasks, in which they searched for a target among a number of…

Background: Cognitive and linguistic factors have been incorporated into models to explain reading comprehension beyond classical models of reading. This study explores the contribution of executive functions, mainly domain-general and reading-specific cognitive flexibility, in reading comprehension of science texts in monolingual Spanish speaking…

Background: Paired Reading (PR), Neurological Impress Method (NIM), Dyad Reading (DR), and Read Two Impress (R2I) share a fundamental trait -- paired synchronous oral reading between a higher-level tutor and a lower-level tutee. Collectively, we refer to these practices as Synchronous Paired Oral Reading Techniques (SPORT). This historical…

Background: Spelling is a prevalent strategy to teach children to read. However, research on the mechanism underlying the contribution of spelling to reading comprehension in Chinese children is limited. Methods: The primary aim of this study was to investigate the concurrent and longitudinal associations between spelling and reading comprehension…

Background: The National Education Policy of India in 2020 indicated a goal that all children will achieve foundational literacy by Grade 3 by 2025. In line with this, the Indian government sets a target of 30 to 35 correct words per minute (cwpm) at Grade 3. However, there are no supporting data for reading fluency targets in the Indian reading…

Background: Arabic is recognised as diglossic; one manifestation of diglossia is the co-existence of two varieties of the language used in different social settings: standard (or literary) Arabic (StA) and spoken Arabic (SpA). The study investigated the impact of lexical-phonological distance in Arabic (identical, cognate, unique, which are…

Reading fluency is a major determinant of reading comprehension but depends on moderating factors such as auditory working memory (AWM), word recognition and sentence reading skills. We investigated how word and sentence reading skills relate to reading comprehension differentially across the first 6 years of schooling and tested which reading…

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique learning experience, characterised by school closures and a shift to online learning. Research suggests that online learning during the pandemic negatively impacted the reading development of elementary school children. However, little is known about the challenges of learning a second language…

Background: In addition to phonological processing and vocabulary, morphological awareness has been clearly identified as contributing to learning to read. While the impact of socio-economic status (SES) has been identified for both phonological processing and vocabulary, less is known about the SES influence on morphological awareness and its…

Background: Precocious readers (PRs) are children who read and comprehend fluently in their native language, without receiving formal instruction. This study examined Hebrew-speaking PRs in comparison with a group of age-matched peers and a group of reading-level-matched peers. By examining Hebrew, which is a transparent orthography when it has…

Background: There is increasing recognition of the contribution of morphological skills to the development of reading fluency. However, theoretical models and recent research raise questions about how different language skills influence reading development. Methods: The present study was designed to follow the reading development of a large sample…

Background: Studies have demonstrated strong predictive and concurrent validity of curriculum-based measures (CBMs) with high-stakes reading tests, mainly using oral reading fluency (ORF) to predict outcomes. Some studies have found that CBMs' predictive accuracy might vary across demographic subgroups of students. In this study, we investigate…

Background: Most previous studies of teaching styles and reading skills have been cross-sectional. Longitudinal research is needed to clarify the direction of effects. The present longitudinal study examined the degree to which differences in teaching styles in the third grade predict the sixth-grade reading performance. The consistency of the…

Background: Of the myriad of reading comprehension (RC) assessments used in schools, multiple-choice (MC) questions continue to be one of the most prevalent formats used by educators and researchers. Outcomes from RC assessments dictate many critical factors encountered during a student's academic career, and it is crucial that we gain a deeper…