Textbooks are heavily used in secondary-level content area classes, but previous research has identified numerous challenges for students associated with reading and understanding these texts. While students can learn reading strategies that help them better understand text, it is unclear the extent to which textbooks are written to promote or…

The concept of readability has had a variable history, moving from a position where it was considered as a very important topic for those responsible for producing texts and matching those texts to the abilities and needs of learners, to its current declining visibility in the education literature. Some important work has been coming from the USA…

Teaching students with moderate and severe intellectual disability who are early readers or nonreaders to engage with grade-level text is challenging. For this reason, purposeful thought must be given to promoting text accessibility and teaching text comprehension. Whenever possible, text should be used as it is originally written without…

This study had two main aims: first, to offer a descriptive account of shared reading program using an evaluative lens and second, to examine whether teachers' perceptions of the importance of phonological awareness, word decoding, and text comprehension in helping young learners develop their reading abilities were indeed emphasized during…

Common Core Reading Standard 10 not only prescribes the difficulty of texts students should become able to read, but also the difficulty diet of texts schools should ask their students to read across the school year. The use of quantitative text-assessment tools in the implementation of this standard warrants an examination into the validity of…

A study of 25 expert teachers and their shared reading lessons in grades 3-8 suggests that teachers focus their modeling during shared reading in four categories: comprehension, vocabulary, text structures, and text features. (Contains 1 figure.)

Traces the career of Jack Stenner. Stenner made the empirical discovery that observable readability could be entirely predicted from word familiarity and sentence length, and applied this "Lexile Framework"(R) to books and readers. Discusses the use of the Lexile Framework as a way to target specific readers. (SLD)

Describes the development of a Spanish version of the Lexile Framework(R) and a Spanish readability equation. Discusses some differences between Spanish and English and how these differences affect the development of the Lexile measures. (SLD)

Describes the Lexile Framework(R), which enables teachers to develop personalized instruction based on Lexile measures of reading ability and Lexiled reading lists. The Lexile Framework is based on the entire book, with individual reading ability measured by tests that measure on the same scale on which the books are measured. As an open standard,…

Describes uses of the Lexile Framework(R) in actual practice in Florida, Georgia, California, and North Carolina. As it connects reading comprehension tests, books, magazines, and newspapers to a common scale of measurement, the Lexile Framework can be used to form a community working for better reading. (SLD)

Describes the Lexile Framework(R), a tool for looking at reader ability relative to the difficulty of a text. It allows a parent, student, teacher, or media coordinator to understand the performance of a reader. Presents examples of current best practices in using lexiles. (SLD)

Discusses the use of the Lexile Framework(R) in several areas. Lexiles have been established for various job groups, and they may serve as an indication of reading ability for a given job. The uses of lexiles in school and in reading education are discussed, as is the achievement of Lexile reading abilities as indicators of probable income. (SLD)

A study examined 52 stories for grades 1-6, randomly chosen from 10 American and Canadian literature-based reading series containing well-known selections by well-known authors. The study compared the reading series selection to the original story cited in the series acknowledgments, seeking patterns of difference in wording, paragraph structure,…

Discusses strategies that teachers can use to support children with and without disabilities in comprehending reading material. Factors contributing to text readability, language learning for students who are deaf or hard of hearing, and strategies for in-class text reading and independent text reading are described. (CR)

Interviews with 16 deaf high school students and 9 teachers found that teachers underestimated the extent of students' independent comprehension of 3 types of text. The text perceived to be most difficult by both teachers and students was the most interesting to students (but not teachers) and fostered use of a greater variety of metacognitive…