With the new edition of this activity book--the companion to Judith Birsh's bestselling text, "Multisensory Teaching of Basic Language Skills"--students and practitioners will get the practice they need to use multisensory teaching effectively with students who have dyslexia and other learning disabilities. Ideal for both pre-service teacher…

This study examined the effectiveness of a yearlong, researcher-provided, Tier 2 (secondary) intervention with a group of sixth-graders. The intervention emphasized word recognition, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Participants scored below a proficiency level on their state accountability test and were compared to a similar group of…

There is a growing literature demonstrating that speech rhythm sensitivity is related to children's reading development, independent of phonological awareness. However, the precise nature of this relationship is less well understood, and further research is warranted to investigate whether speech rhythm sensitivity predicts the different…

Adult literacy interventions often rely on models of reading validated with children or adult populations with a broad range of reading abilities. Such models do not fully satisfy the need for intervention research and development for adults with low literacy. Thus, the authors hypothesized that a model representing the relationship between…

The United States' National Institute for Literacy's (NIFL) review of adult literacy instruction research recommended adult education (AE) programs assess underlying reading abilities in order to plan appropriate instruction for low-literacy learners. This study developed adult reading ability groups using measures from power tests and speeded…

Research suggests that parent involvement improves academic achievement, but in the busy world in which we live it is often difficult to promote. Many researchers suggest that successful programs value parents' limited time constraints, diversity of literacy skills, and availability of materials. The Great Poetry Race provides an easy vehicle to…

With a unique focus on grades 4 and 5, this book explains how to design and implement a research-based reading program that helps all students build major literacy skills (word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension). The expert authors present ready-to-use activities, strategies, and lesson plans, along with detailed guidance for…

In recent years, interest in reading fluency development in first language, and second and foreign language (L2/FL) settings has increased. Reading fluency, in which readers decode and comprehend at the same time, is critical to successful reading. Fluent readers are accurate and fast in their ability to recognize words, and in their use of…

Two struggling fourth-grade readers with learning disabilities who have severe deficits in word recognition, comprehension, and reading fluency improve their reading skills using a method that combines intensive word study with the timed repeated reading of poetry. The direct instruction included semantics, morphology, orthography, and…

A large gap is evident between the reading and related skills performance of Aboriginal students compared with that of their non-indigenous peers and this gap increases over the primary years of schooling. In this study, 34 students attended a tutorial centre in Sydney for older low-progress readers in Years 5 and 6, for two school terms. All…

This study compared the effects on reading outcomes of delivering supplemental, small-group intervention to first-grade students at risk for reading difficulties randomly assigned to one of three different treatment schedules: extended (4 sessions per week, 16 weeks; n = 66), concentrated (4 sessions per week, 8 weeks; n = 64), or distributed (2…

Reading is an important component of academic success and a skill required for many adult responsibilities. Many strategies exist that claim to increase reading comprehension. However, in contrast to foundational reading skills (e.g., vocabulary, fluency, decoding), there is relatively little research that has been done on reading comprehension…

In a longitudinal study, development of word reading fluency and spelling were followed for almost 8 years. In a group of 115 students (65 girls, 50 boys) acquiring the phonologically transparent German orthography, prediction measures (letter knowledge, phonological short-term memory, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and…

This study examined the effectiveness of Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (FORI) on improving reading fluency for an ethnically diverse sample of second-grade students. FORI incorporates the repeated reading of a grade-level text over the course of an academic week. This approach to reading uses scaffolding by expert readers. Results indicate…

This study examined the relationships of 3 levels of reading fluency--the individual word, the syntactic unit, and the whole passage--to reading comprehension among 278 5th graders heterogeneous in reading ability. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that reading fluency at each level related uniquely to performance on a standardized reading…