This study examined the effects of adjusting the difficulty level of instructional materials on the on-task time and comprehension of four students with emotional and behavioral disorders. All participants previously exhibited low rates of on-task behavior during reading assignments. Students were presented with reading materials at their…

Current standards push for elementary students to have text-based and text-centric discussions of what they read. This study explored what bilingual third-grade students talked about during small-group text-based discussions of informational texts. The author conducted a qualitative analysis of 10 video-recorded discussions, five of books matched…

In the field of second language acquisition (SLA), a large base of research has shown the great influence of L2 reading on L2 vocabulary acquisition. Nevertheless, researchers have also found that acquiring new vocabulary happens rather gradually and in small amounts. Without altering the incidental nature of vocabulary acquisition through…

In her new book, bestselling author and professional developer Carol Booth Olson and colleagues show teachers how to help young readers and writers construct meaning from and with texts. This practical resource offers a rich array of research-based teaching strategies, activities, and extended lessons focused on the "thinking tools"…

The "acceleration phenomenon" (AP) is defined by improvements in reading speed and reading comprehension, induced by an artificial text fading procedure corresponding to the previously determined fastest individual reading rate. Recent results, however, indicated that fading that is slower than the self-paced reading rate can produce…

The present study identifies reading instructional practices used in upper elementary classrooms during the age of high-stakes test accountability and compares reading practices among schools of varying accreditation status and socio-economic status (SES). The current study partially replicates and extends a study conducted by Baumann, Hoffman,…

A quasi-experimental pretest/posttest group design was used to determine whether computer-assisted fluency instruction is as effective as print-based, teacher-led fluency instruction in improving fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension skills in third grade students experiencing delayed fluency development. Fifty participants were randomly assigned…

This article provides a statistical analysis of the reading gains observed at one American school in the Caribbean that was using Accelerated Reader. It provides an estimate of the number of hours students needed to read to advance their reading performance an additional year. The authors estimate how much Accelerated Reader contributed to the…

In this research, parents and children participated in a comprehensive book reading intervention designed to improve children's literacy. Over eight weeks during the summer, children in the intervention condition were encouraged to read one book weekly and parents were trained to foster reading comprehension. Forty-eight Grades 3 and 5 children…

In the current era of accountability, U.S. teachers face strict demands from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to ensure that all students' reading achievement meets the requirements of their respective grade levels (Coburn, Pearson, & Woulfin, 2011). These demands are especially stressful when teachers have students who struggle with reading.…

This book demonstrates a five-part framework for teachers, reading specialists, and literacy coaches who want to help their least engaged students become powerful readers. Merging theory and practice, the guide offers successful strategies to reach your "struggling" learners. The authors show how you can "turn-around" your instructional practice,…

This study investigated how the context of a Primary 3 (P3) teacher of Luganda in Uganda influenced the teacher's literacy instructional decision-making, beliefs, pedagogy, and practices before and after she was provided with supplies and literacy instructional procedures that helped produce reading materials for her students. The contextual…

The current study replicated Gickling and Armstrong (1978) by using curriculum-based assessment for instructional design to match reading materials to skill levels of three third-graders who were struggling readers with low levels of on-task behavior. Difficulty levels of the reading passages were grouped according to ratios of known and unknown…

This textbook is a third-year reader in a series of illustrated primary readers prepared by the same editor for the first, second, and third grades, leading up to the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade readers. The editor has made a careful study of the most authoritative and recent reports, investigations, courses of study, surveys, and other…

Describes an individualized remedial reading program where students choose their own reading lessons within a framework structured by the teacher. (TO)