Parent tutoring has been successfully used to increase children's oral reading fluency. However, commonly used procedures pose a challenge for parents who are not proficient in reading or who speak English as a second language. A taped reading program that included listening passage preview, repeated reading, and performance feedback was developed…

This study investigated the accuracy of several early literacy measures that have been used in research and practice for first grade reading screening. A set of measures, Word Identification Fluency (WIF), Letter Naming Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, and Nonsense Word Fluency, were administered as screening measures with 138 first grade…

The relationship between reading fluency and comprehension was evaluated in five 4th-grade students. These students were identified as being at risk of not meeting yearly goals in reading fluency and comprehension based on fall benchmark assessment data. A brief intervention assessment was used to determine which intervention components would be…

The study concerns reading development and its precursors in a transparent orthography. Dutch children differing in family risk for dyslexia were followed from kindergarten through fifth grade. In fifth grade, at-risk dyslexic (n = 22), at-risk non-dyslexic (n = 45), and control children (n = 12) were distinguished. In kindergarten, the at-risk…

This study explored student-level predictors of reading achievement among third grade regular education students. Predictors included student demographics (sex and socioeconomic status (SES), using free and reduced lunch as proxy for SES), direct observations of reading skills (oral reading fluency (ORF) and word decoding skill (nonsense word…

In the teaching of foreign language reading, there have been at least three distinctive approaches for communicative competence: grammar translation method, comprehension-questions approach with an emphasis on reading skills and strategies, and extensive reading approach. This paper surveys a selection of recent studies that address important…

The present study reports the basic characteristics of a game-like application entitled "Playing with Words-PwW". PwW is a single-user application where a word must be guessed given an anagram of that word. Anagrams are presented from a predefined word list and users can repeatedly try to guess the word, from which the anagram is…

The current study investigated the scope of bilingual language control differentiating between whole-language control involving control of an entire lexicon specific to 1 language and lexical-level control involving only a restricted set of recently activated lexical representations. To this end, we tested 60 Dutch-English (Experiment 1) and 64…

L. S. Vygotsky, the psychologist and teacher from Byelorussia who became a central figure in Soviet psychological and educational circles in the 1920s and 1930s, has become a frequent citation in 21st-century scholarship. He is most-often invoked to support some form of instructional scaffolding, based on his idea of the zone of proximal…

There are many established reading strategy training programmes, which explicitly teach strategic and meta-cognitive knowledge to improve reading comprehension. Although instruction in strategy knowledge leads to improvements in meta-cognitive skills, the effects do not always transfer to reading comprehension. Therefore, to investigate…

The purpose of the present studies was to provide the means to create brief versions of instruments that can aid the diagnosis and classification of students with learning disabilities and comorbid disorders (e.g., attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder). A sample of 1,108 students with and without a diagnosis of learning disabilities took part…

The intense focus on standards and accountability is rapidly altering the education environment. Often the gauge for measuring school effectiveness is performance on high-stake state tests. In this retrospective cohort comparison study, I observe the relation between the use of curriculum-based measures (CBMs) for reading and change on a state…

This study examined the impact of a 15-min daily explicit vocabulary intervention in Spanish on expressive and receptive vocabulary knowledge and oral reading fluency in Spanish, and on language proficiency in English. Fifty Spanish-speaking English learners who received 90 min of Spanish reading instruction in an early transition model were…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of cover, copy, and compare (CCC) procedures on spelling performance with two students. The participants were two elementary students enrolled in a self-contained behavior intervention classroom. A multiple baseline design across participants was employed to evaluate the effects of CCC…

This exploratory study examined the ways in which fourth grade students, in an urban setting, responded to a nine-week implementation of Marzano's Six Step Vocabulary Process. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between the direct instruction of vocabulary and the effects on student achievement as measured by Vocabulary…