Background: Although Zimbabwe has performed quite well on Grade 6 SACMEQ literacy assessments compared to other African countries, reading levels are generally low and there is little research on reading literacy in Zimbabwean primary schools. Aim: Grade 3 and 4 learners' reading comprehension (RC), accuracy and speed in oral reading fluency (ORF)…

Text reading fluency (TRF) is a common reading intervention target in second and third grade. TRF requires the integration of several skills that result in several pathways to dysfluent reading. However, when applying the drill-down approach to intervention targeting, practitioners are guided to consider students' rate and accuracy when reading…

Word is important in Chinese reading. However, when inter-word spaces are inserted into Chinese text, there is no facilitation or disruption to adults' reading. Researchers argued that there was a trade-off between word segmentation facilitation and disruption due to format unfamiliarity. To assess the trade-off hypothesis, in Experiment 1, we…

The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) and reading skills in distinguishing gifted students from their non-gifted peers. A total of 260 third grade students participated in the study. Of these students, 144 were gifted, while the others were not. As the data collection tools, personal information…

Little is known about what contributes to individual differences in reading fluency after accounting for accuracy. Previous research has shown individual differences in the relative growth in word and nonword reading, specifically a pattern in which students who start lower on reading grow more in word than nonword reading ability. The purpose of…

Language skills have an important place in people's thinking, understanding people around them and expressing themselves. Reading skills, which are among the otherlanguage skills, play a vitalrole for an individual in adapting them into his daily life. Reading should not be interpreted as recognizing merely the letters, the word and articulating…

The role of children's receptive vocabulary knowledge in word and nonword reading (decoding) in an orthographically transparent language is debated. Moreover, we have little understanding of how the role of vocabulary might differ between monolingual children and bilingual children from immigrant families (or language minority bilingual children…

In this study, it was investigated how the reading skills of students who were in the 3rd grade of primary school when the COVID-19 pandemic started (March 2020) were affected at the end of the fourth grade (June 2021) due to the school closure during the pandemic. The study employed the longitudinal survey model. Ten teachers and 18 primary…

Early intervention for children with reading impairments is crucial in order to achieve reading improvements and avoid school failure. One line of reading intervention research focuses on the experimental manipulation of reading rate through a text-fading training approach. Considering relevant reading-related predictors (i.e., orthographic…

This matched-sample study investigates the use of a wide range of texts of varying--and often challenging--complexity to promote fluency for students experiencing below grade level achievement. We designed a repeated-reading protocol called 'Read Like Us', and performed a pilot implementation in small groups with third- and fourth-grade students…

Background: The Progress in International Reading and Literacy 2021 results draw stark attention to an ongoing crisis in primary education in South Africa. Research attempting to understand and address continued underperformance has focused on literacy learning and teaching in schools where the language of learning and teaching (LOLT) is the same…

Recent studies have accumulated to suggest that children, akin to adults, exhibit a processing advantage for formulaic language (e.g. "save energy") over novel language (e.g. "sell energy"), as well as sensitivity to phrase frequencies. The majority of these studies are based on formulaic sequences in their canonical form. In…

Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word…

Purpose: The study aimed to examine whether oral reading prosody--the use of acoustic features (e.g., pitch and duration variations) when reading passages aloud--predicts reading fluency and comprehension abilities. Method: We measured vocabulary, syntax, word reading, reading fluency (including rate and accuracy), reading comprehension (in Grades…

There is no obvious boundary information in Chinese reading. It has been shown that the introduction of word boundary information presented with alternating colors without changing the text distribution could significantly improve the reading speed of Chinese children in grade 2 (Perea and Wang in Mem Cognit 45(7):1160-1170, 2017.…