Spanish-English cognates (words from ancestrally related languages similar in appearance and meaning) are plentiful in students' reading materials, but few researchers have documented elementary-age bilingual (Spanish-English) students' actual use of cognates. The authors drew from two qualitative research studies to show how bilingual students…

Background: In countries with German as an official language, children with German as a second language perform overall worse in school than their German native speaking peers. This particularly affects written language skills, which require advanced language knowledge. The reasons are manifold, but one is prominent, namely poor vocabulary…

The present study tested the self-teaching hypothesis in orthographic learning in Chinese and examined the roles of semantic radicals and writing practice. Twenty-four Mandarin-speaking third graders read and comprehended eight two-sentence stories in a read-twice condition and eight in a read-write condition. Each story contained two…

Writing allows access to venues often limited by poverty, disabilities, and geography. Promoting writing skills can create bridges to overcome the isolation that often keeps communities from engaging with one another. However, most of the students in the nation's schools are not capable writers and find the persuasive genres challenging. In this…

As recent studies and theoretical assumptions suggest that the quality of texts composed by children and adolescents is affected by their transcription skills, this experimental field trial aims at investigating the impact of combined handwriting/spelling training on fluency, spelling and text quality among normally developing 3rd graders…

A quasi-experimental study was conducted to examine the impact of Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction on 3rd-5th grade deaf and hard of hearing students' writing and written language compared to a business-as-usual condition (treatment group N = 41, comparison group N = 22). A total of 18 hours of instruction was provided for each of two…

Although performance feedback interventions successfully lead to improvements in students' performance, research suggests that the combination of feedback and goal setting leads to greater performance than either component alone and that graphing performance in relation to a goal can lead to improvements in academic performance. The goal of the…

Dramatic language arts integration (DLA) and conventional language arts (CLA) lessons were compared for their influence on third grade students' written narrative cohesion and on-task behavior in a self-contained, nonpublic elementary classroom. Participants included students (N = 14) with comorbid language-based learning disabilities (LD) and…

In a randomized controlled trial, 205 students were followed from grades 1 to 3 with a focus on changes in their writing trajectories following an evidence-based intervention during the spring of second grade. Students were identified as being at-risk (n=138), and then randomized into treatment (n=68) versus business-as-usual conditions (n=70). A…

In a randomized controlled trial, 205 students were followed from grades 1 to 3 with a focus on changes in their writing trajectories following an evidence-based intervention during the spring of second grade. Students were identified as being at-risk (n = 138), and then randomized into treatment (n = 68) versus business-as-usual conditions (n =…

The first part of the present paper deals with the analysis of the literary theory and linguistic background of the reader-response method, respectively with the presentation of the process of composition and its psychological components. The reader-response textual interpretation method can take several different approaches of literary theory,…

Research on evidence-based writing intervention practices as well as reliable and valid assessments of elementary-aged students' writing fluency has been lacking compared to other academic areas (i.e., reading). Performance feedback interventions targeting writing fluency are gaining empirical support (Eckert et al., 2006); however, growth…

Although the four-day school week originated in 1936, it was not widely implemented until 1973 when there was a need to conserve energy and reduce operating costs. This study investigated how achievement tests scores of schools with a four-day school week compared with schools with a traditional five-day school week. The study focused on student…

Educational practices are needed to promote strong vocabulary growth so that vocabulary can be both the cause and result of successful reading. Vocabulary interventions need to begin early and continue for a sustained period of time (Beck & McKeown, 2007a; Biemiller, 2003; Foorman, Seals, Anthony & Pollard-Durodola, 2003). According to theoretical…

Improving teacher effectiveness is a key strategy to ensure student readiness for college and careers and to address achievement gaps and persistent low performance. In response to the new Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS-ELA) the National Writing Project (NWP) created a professional development (PD) program to support…