Vocabulary is a prominent contributor to reading comprehension. However, little is known about how students with disabilities with lower vocabulary performance respond to Tier 1 instruction, or how their vocabulary knowledge relates to their content acquisition. To examine the differential impact of Tier 1 instruction for U.S. middle school…

With a focus on content-area reading, this study aimed to (a) understand the sources and prevalence of concurrent and specific difficulties in word-level skills, vocabulary, and knowledge among adolescent struggling readers (ASRs) and (b) explore the relations among reading skills, profiles, and reading comprehension. A dual-measure screening…

Students are starting middle school without the foundational reading skills necessary to access the texts in their content area classes, such as science and social studies. This is causing great frustration for the teachers who feel unsure of how to help these students because they did not learn about how students learn to read in their teacher…

Guided by the Simple View of Reading (SVR considers reading comprehension as a product of decoding and listening comprehension) and the self-teaching hypothesis applied to Chinese (Li et al. in Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 24(3):252-263), this research examined (1) whether the SVR is applicable to L2 morphosyllabic Chinese;…

Prior studies suggest that teaching reading strategies promotes reading comprehension in adolescents who have difficulties with reading comprehension, yet the results of those studies are mixed. Individual differences in students' vocabulary knowledge may explain these mixed results. This article examines to what extent vocabulary knowledge…

Many middle-school students struggle with basic reading skills. One reason for this might be a lack of automaticity in word-level lexical processes. To investigate this, we used a novel backward masking paradigm, in which a written word is either covered with a mask or not. Participants (N = 444 [after exclusions]; n[subscript female] = 264,…

This study aimed to explore the role of inference making in the relation between vocabulary knowledge (breadth and depth) and reading comprehension for 487 ninth-grade Chinese EFL students who were categorized as either struggling or adequate. Path analysis was used to examine both direct and mediated effects. The results indicated a statistically…

This study examined the relationship between knowledge of academic vocabulary and reading comprehension in data contributed by 5855 middle school students. Each student completed an academic vocabulary assessment, a standardized reading comprehension test, and one of four types of novel vocabulary-depth measures. "Multiword expressions"…

The purpose of this study is to identify to what extent that the reading comprehension, question types, attitude toward science, test method, and subject matter knowledge predict the PISA scientific literacy scores of the students. The study uses the method of correlational research, which is a type of quantitative research method. We reached out…

Teachers' knowledge of reading comprehension processes is under-researched relative to teachers' knowledge of word identification and phonological awareness. In this study, sixty-two pre- and inservice upper-elementary and middle school English language arts, science, and social studies teachers completed in-depth interview protocols eliciting…

Have you ever found it difficult to read something due to your lack of knowledge on the topic? We investigated this phenomenon with a sample of 3,534 high school students who took a background knowledge test before working on reading comprehension tasks on the topic of ecology. Broken-line regression revealed a knowledge threshold such that below…

Creating Habits That Accelerate the Academic Language of Students (CHAAOS) is a vocabulary intervention developed by O'Connor et al. to improve the academic vocabulary of middle school students with disabilities. This study was designed as a replication of O'Connor et al.'s study; CHAAOS lessons were taught to 33 sixth graders who received special…

Comprehension is a primary ingredient of reading success--but most educators aren't taught how to deliver structured comprehension instruction in their classrooms. K-8 teachers will find the guidance they need in this groundbreaking professional resource from Nancy Hennessy, former IDA President and an expert on reading comprehension. Meticulously…

Aim/Purpose: This exploratory qualitative case study examines the perceptions of high-school learners of English regarding a pedagogical intervention involving progressive reduction of captions (full, sentence-level, keyword captions, and no-captions) in enhancing language learning. Background: Recognizing the limitations of caption usage in…

This report describes a research-practice partnership project between researchers and a group of Years 7 and 8 teachers from schools serving diverse communities throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. The schools represented in the study were demographically and geographically diverse and served urban, mixed, and rural communities in the North and South…