Purpose: This commentary responds to the implications for child language intervention of Catts and Kamhi's (2017) call to move from viewing reading comprehension as a single ability to recognizing it as a complex constellation of reader, text, and activity. Method: Reading comprehension, as Catts and Kamhi explain, is very complicated. In this…

Taking Swedish secondary school students as a point of departure, this article focuses on aspects of teaching and learning critical literacy and specifically on what students identify as argumentative text structure. Challenges connected to teaching critical literacies can be considered quite big, since studies show that students have difficulties…

Most people have struggled with reading in one situation or another, depending on their appreciation for the content, their prior experiences, and the texts. This department column shares ways for educators to help literacy learners unlock their potential with instruction anchored in their skills, knowledge, ways of learning, interests, and…

In this systematic review of the literature, reading interventions for adolescent English language learners (ELLs) were evaluated to determine the state of the existing research, identify promising practices, and to guide future research. Eight studies met the inclusion criteria and were assessed to determine if they met What Works Clearinghouse…

Reading and creating stories is a longstanding pedagogical approach to literacy learning in elementary school classrooms because stories offer personal and human experiences to which students can relate and respond. Stories, including digital forms such as short films, offer accounts of what it is to belong to a community and its worldviews and…

Wide vocabulary knowledge is associated with proficiency in reading comprehension and scores on tests involving comprehension. Yet assessments show that U.S. students at various grade levels have demonstrated no improvement in their vocabulary knowledge since 2009. Literacy expert Timothy Rasinski and colleagues argue that students need improved…

Play is an important activity in young children's lives. It is how children explore their world and build knowledge. Although free play, which is play that is totally child directed, contributes to children's learning, self-regulation and motivation, adults' participation in children's play is critical in their development, especially their…

Purpose: The benefit of stimulus variability for generalization of acquired skills and knowledge has been shown in motor, perceptual, and language learning but has rarely been studied in reading. We studied the effect of variable training in a novel language on reading trained and untrained words. Method: Sixty typical adults received 2 sessions…

Understanding how to support student reading comprehension has long been a goal for education research. Yet no existing literature review links interactional scaffolding, defined as the responsive in-person support an expert reader offers to a novice, and reading comprehension. This review employed theories of scaffolding and reading comprehension…

Thirty years ago in this journal, Aylett Royall Cox reported on the development of "Alphabetic Phonics," a revision of the existing Orton Gillingham treatment for children with dyslexia. This paper continues that discussion and reports on the evolution of that curriculum as it is represented in a comprehensive dyslexia treatment program…

This teaching tip showcases how students use iPads to video record themselves orally reading. In the Record, Listen, Reflect process, students conduct repeated readings with a familiar text, watch the recorded video, and conduct running records on themselves. Having an opportunity to watch videos of their own reading gives students a glimpse of…

Higher education is facing a challenge with as many as 60% of entering students at community colleges testing into one or more developmental level classes each year (Bailey & Cho, 2010, p. 46). This is a crisis that impacts economics, graduation rates, and student morale. The study of students' perceptions of themselves and their educational…

Over the past 65 years, the roles of the reading specialist have continually evolved. Historically, reading specialists have been hired by schools to work predominantly with struggling readers (Bean, Cassidy, Grumet, Shelton & Wallis, 2002; Bean, Swan & Knaub, 2003). Reading specialists today serve in a variety of roles within their…

As the incidence rate of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) appears to increase, the need for evidence-based reading interventions for these students, which are important for the reading development of students with ASD, also increases. Unfortunately, there has been little research on evidence-based strategies to effectively improve the…

Posing text-dependent questions is crucial for facilitating students' comprehension of the text. However, text-dependent questions should not merely ask students to reflect the author's literal or even inferential meaning. The author's message is the starting place for comprehension, rather than the end goal or object of comprehension. The text…