Over 60 years of conflicting messaging about the usefulness and impact of grammar on writing has guided instructional practice in K-12 classrooms across the country. In Florida, like many other states, reading scores have continued to decline despite multiple efforts to identify the root causes of learning deficiencies. Even though research…

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate linguistic variation within ESL/EFL reading textbooks and between EAP reading textbooks and lower-division university textbooks. Specifically, within ESL/EFL reading textbooks, lexical, lexico-grammatical, and formulaic variation was measured within series of textbooks, across textbooks at the…

Student's low reading and writing proficiency in higher education has been the subject of a large body of research (e.g., Bahr, 2011; Bailey, 2010; Carlino, 2005, 2010, 2012; Flink, 2017; Jaggars, 2014 Pacello, 2014; Perin, 2011; Perin et al., 2013). The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how students in a first-year developmental…

Language is a powerful tool authors use to construct meaning. To better meet the needs of their students, teachers need to learn about how language is used in text so that they can better help their students to comprehend the texts they read. This study investigated how a small group of pre-service teachers (PSTs) in an intermediate reading…

A novel word learning paradigm in a reading context was employed to investigate the ability of adults with and without learning disability to learn new words. The participants were required to read a short English story. The story was based on an Indian folk tale to eliminate any confounding effect of familiarity with content. Two nouns and two…

This qualitative study examined the amount of time that fourth and fifth grade teachers devoted to literacy instruction within the time allotted to them within the daily literacy block. Prior research of the literacy block focused largely on primary grades (Allington, McGill-Franzen et a1.,2010; Cunningham & Allington, 2003; Morrow, 1992);…