Strong reading and literacy skills are essential for students' success in K-12 and beyond by providing the foundation for understanding the world and communicating effectively. This Spotlight will help readers learn how classroom conversations can boost reading proficiency; identify research on how to get students absorbed in reading; examine…

Background: Reading and reading comprehension are crucial skills, yet many students in grade 4 struggle with them. To address this, several instructional practices have gained popularity. For one, explicit reading strategy instruction (ERSI) is deemed useful, given the finding that successful readers tend to employ reading strategies. As a second…

This article adopts a Bakhtinian understanding of dialogue to explore the affordances of virtual book clubs, and how they can foster dialogues and encourage dialogic thinking in students. Drawing on a qualitative case study of 11-year-old students participating in an online book club, we explore how digital book clubs open dialogic spaces for…

This article reflects on transformations of modes of reading in an information age, asking what "creative reading" entails in information-intensive, multimodal environments. We currently face the challenge of the development of reading strategies that oscillate between "close" and "distant" reading. For years, these…

The category of nonfiction picture books has changed in the past few decades, putting more emphasis on engaging writing styles, attention to accuracy, and using synergic relations between images and texts. As a result of this shift, the strategies taught to students for reading nonfiction picture books must change. The author presents five…

Reciprocal teaching (RT) involves collaborative dialogue between the teacher and students, with the aim of jointly constructing the meaning from a shared text. This study employs RT as a cognitive and metacognitive set of strategies for enhancing students' reading comprehension and monitoring skills. Thirty-four students were assigned to the RT…

Preparing English as a foreign language (EFL) students for final exams and language exams has become more and more significant in secondary education. However, those students who continue their studies as English majors have to live up to new expectations and rise to different challenges such as reading and discussing literary texts written in…

Purpose: Early literacy skills are key indicators of future reading development for young dual language learners (DLLs). Additionally, emerging evidence indicates that young children's executive function (EF) skills are uniquely associated with elementary school reading outcomes (Ribner et al., 2017). Therefore, the purpose of this pilot study was…

Students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) have difficulty with most reading skills, including reading comprehension. Improving reading comprehension skills requires efficient interventions that consider both meaning- and code-based skills simultaneously. Using a single-subject multiple-baseline design across participants, with alternating…

This quantitative study aimed to examine the relationships between third grade reading instructional strategies in high-performing Title-One schools compared to low-performing Title-One schools in four school districts in South Carolina. The study was framed through the lens of Marzano's Theoretical Framework which outlined specific instructional…

The effects of extensive, timed, and repeated oral reading on 101 lower-intermediate Japanese university L2 English learners' reading rates and comprehension were investigated over one academic year. The participants were divided into four quasiexperimental groups: (a) Group 1 did extensive, timed, and repeated oral reading with prosody and…

In the summer of 2020, amidst state-mandated social distancing and protests for racial justice, youth participating in an ongoing YPAR initiative sought to design and facilitate a book club for the residents of their subsidized housing community to increase community awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement. Through interviews, youth shared…

Many early childhood educators use the evidenced-based practice of interactive shared book reading (ISBR) to promote the development of important communication and literacy skills. ISBR for preschoolers has been shown to build both vocabulary and conceptual knowledge, which in turn contributes to later language and reading comprehension…

Readers' prior knowledge is an important factor for comprehending scientific texts. The study used an eye tracker to examine the reading processes of the undergraduates with high (HPK) and low prior knowledge (LPK) while reading a long printed scientific article. The results of measuring the eye movements offered some interesting findings. First,…

This study explores children's agency in shared book reading sessions with parents and its relation to family literacy characteristics, parents' literacy practices with children and children's print knowledge. Research participants were 142 Czech children, ages 3-6, and their parents. Parents rated their children's agency and the attributes of the…