This single subject experimental design study used an adapted alternating treatment design to examine the effects of a synthetic phonics intervention and an analytic phonics intervention on oral reading accuracy, oral reading rate, and letter-sound correspondences among first grade students. Students who were reading at least two levels below…

Since corpus linguistics gained popularity as a methodology in the latter half of the 20th century, second language acquisition research has seen the emergence of work investigating formulaic language, such as idioms, lexical bundles, and collocations. A collocation is a string of words that co-occur more routinely than probability would predict,…

The purpose of this quantitative quasi-experimental group comparison study using a repeated measures comparison group design with random assignment of subjects to groups was to investigate the effects of handwriting instruction on reading progress for learners in grade 1 and grade 2. At three points in time, the number of words each student read…

The purpose of this quantitative, quasi-experimental study was to investigate the impact of a repeated reading fluency intervention focused on prosody, counterbalanced with an intervention focused on reading strategies. Both of these interventions were designed to promote feelings of achievement through participation in activities intended to…

The purpose of this dissertation was to determine the effects of repeated reading on readers identified as below grade in sixth and seventh grade. The study was set in a rural middle school located in the foothills of North Carolina. Students selected for the study were identified utilizing Lexile levels to identify them as below grade level for…

The present study examines the representation and composition of meaning in scalar implicatures. Scalar implicature is the phenomenon whereby the use of a less informative term (e.g., "some") is inferred to mean the negation of a more informative term (e.g., to mean "not all"). The experiments reported here investigate how the…

Proficient reading is a necessary skill for a quality life. While educators would like to believe that most students master the art of reading and can understand what they read, national reports indicate that learning to read and becoming a skilled reader is not mastered by all (No Child Left Behind Act, 2001; NICHD, 2000a). One component of…

This study described oral reading fluency and within word pattern spelling, using rate and accuracy as the fluency measures. Oral reading measures, including reading for one minute, reading an entire passage, word recognition in isolation, and in context reading accuracy were examined with 56 second, third, fourth, and fifth graders. All students…

The purpose of the study was to determine whether the Readiness for Education At a Distance Indicator (READI) assessment tool could predict student success in an online basic communication course through a comparison of students' scores on the READI assessment to students' final grade point average (GPA) in an online course. The population of the…

Fluency instruction has had limited effects on reading comprehension relative to reading rate and prosodic reading (Dowhower, 1987; Herman, 1985; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000a). More specific components (i.e., error detection) of comprehension may yield larger effects through exposure to a wider range of materials…

Fluent reading hinges on automatic word recognition, yet little research has investigated the acquisition process with repeated exposure to novel words. In this study, elementary students in grades three to six were asked to read two-syllable pseudowords five times each (in varied sequences) during two sessions (n = 49). The goal was to study…