This mixed methods study examines 126 community college students enrolled in developmental reading courses at a mid-sized Southwestern community college. These students participated in a survey-based study regarding their reading experiences and practices, social influence upon those practices, reading sponsorship, and reading self-efficacy. The…

This study sought to determine if, by providing parents with a workshop on the use of dialogic reading techniques during the storybook reading event in the home, Pre-Kindergarten children's attitude and interest in reading would improve. Parents completed a survey prior to the workshop and two months following completion of the workshop. Through…

A positive association between interest and learning from texts has been well noted in the literature. However, the cause of the positive association between interest and learning from text is uncertain. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to examine a potential cause, inference generation, of the positive association between interest and…

This article discusses how reading for their own purposes affected struggling teens. It shares the authors' story, which demonstrates the importance and power of focusing on students' purposes, as highlighted in Standard 12, a standard not often addressed or assessed, but one that matters to students and teachers alike. The authors describe how a…

The purpose of this research was to examine the role of personalized and non-personalized online texts on elementary school fifth grade students' comprehension and their attitudes toward reading. Participants were 47 fifth-grade students from a rural elementary school in north Florida. The subjects were randomly assigned into two (personalized…

In this study, the effect of freedom of reader choice on the incidental acquisition of vocabulary was investigated in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) reading classes. Despite advocating free extensive reading as a means of obtaining a native-like L2 vocabulary,existing studies investigating the incidental acquisition of vocabulary have not…

Close reading is an instructional practice that has gained attention of late. It involves reading a complex text, annotation, and repeatedly reading to answer text-dependent questions. Although there are a number of recommendations for the use of close reading, there has not been a systematic analysis of student or teacher perceptions of this…

The purpose of the present study was to identify the correlation between gender and reading preferences and reading strategies employed by 5th and 6th Grade students of primary school in Greece. The main objectives of the present study were (1) to identify possible differences between male and female students in employing cognitive and…

As both a teacher and a parent, Ranck-Buhr knows a little something about working with students and keeping them engaged in the reading and writing processes... even recalling a son who was a reluctant book-report writer until he was offered some choice of reading material. She suggests practical ways to implement two vital elements in the…

In this article, the author describes her new approach to collection development. To fulfill her dream of each kid walking out of the library with the book they asked for, she enlisted the help of her students. Once they realized that their suggestions were taken seriously, the more they were willing to take the time to tell her about the great…

Every adult who reads to a child has seen what happens when a book speaks. For a time, the book becomes the child's beloved friend. It is asked for repeatedly and learned by heart. But books do more than speak to a child. Children use books to speak to adults. If one wants to understand a child's deepest emotions, take a look at the books they…

In recent decades, researchers have indicated that U.S. schools have underexposed elementary grade students to informational text. The increased exposure to this genre should be a top instructional priority. In the present study, we explored 46 third-grade students' attitudes toward and perceptions of informational text. Using three data sources…

When working as a teacher of deaf students, Melissa Herzig's school was a magnet high school just five minutes from the border of Mexico, where 95 percent of the students were Latinos. The deaf students' experiences with languages may involve using American Sign Language (ASL), a sign language they may have learned in their home country, English,…

Little is known about reading ability among doctoral students. Thus, we used a fully mixed concurrent equal status design (Leech & Onwuegbuzie, 2009) to examine 205 doctoral students in the College of Education and their reasons for reading research articles. A thematic analysis revealed 5 themes (subsumed by 2 meta-themes) explaining reasons…

This study employed a triangulated mixed method to investigate reading motivation of Chinese middle school students in Taiwan. A total of 247 seventh grade students (122 boys and 125 girls) participated voluntarily by completing the Chinese Motivation for Research Questionnaire (CMRQ). Sixteen of the 247 students were purposely selected to…