The role of the teacher, specifically teacher craft, is central to engaging students in effective reading instruction. However, the science of reading has revealed that the content taught is also important to reading acquisition. Although the science of reading was aggregated some two decades ago to result in what became known as the five big…

Although there have been a substantial number of research studies focused on improving the field's understanding of the development of the ability to read, very few of these studies have accounted for the potential role that extensive engagement in the act of reading might play in the development of reading proficiency. There are several views on…

In this essay, I outline some of the essential ingredients of a universal theory of reading acquisition, one that seeks to highlight commonalities while embracing the global diversity of languages, writing systems, and cultures. I begin by stressing the need to consider insights from multiple disciplines including neurobiology, cognitive science,…

I detail findings from an ethnographic study of a high school remedial reading class, with a particular focus on students' perceptions of what it means to be literate and how their mandatory enrollment in the course impacted their identities. Compounding students' experiences was the existence of a high-stakes reading examination that all students…

Informational reading instruction plays an important role in early literacy but has traditionally received less emphasis than literary text in elementary classrooms. This mixed-methods study illuminates trends from observed reading instruction of 77 first-year elementary teachers, drawing on data from 761 lesson segments scored with the Protocol…

Using a sample of 116 Norwegian undergraduate readers in this experimental study, we investigated whether reading informational text on a tablet versus on paper would lead to differences with respect to strategic text processing and text comprehension. Strategic text processing was measured by means of verbal protocol analysis, and text…

Studies have shown that inferential questions encourage a more in-depth understanding of texts and that students need to learn appropriate strategies for answering them, particularly when they deal with multiple texts. In this experimental study, the authors aimed to improve eighth-grade students' (13- to 14-years old) ability to answer intra- and…