English learners (ELs) struggle with vocabulary learning and often evidence serious vocabulary gaps. It is challenging, especially for professionals who do not speak the native language of the students, to teach EL students vocabulary that supports academic learning, is compatible with classroom instruction, and considers their changing language…

The state of reading proficiency in the United States has been under attack for decades. Attempts to improve reading achievement through instructional practices have taken the profession through the "reading wars" to "balanced-reading" to "evidenced-based" methods. Unfortunately, the professional development of…

Williams syndrome is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by deletion of approximately 25 genes on chromosome 7q11.23. Children with the syndrome evidence large individual differences in both broad language and reading abilities. Nevertheless, as a group, children with this syndrome show a consistent pattern characterized by relative…

The inaugural issue of "Topics in Language Disorders" included articles by Roth and Perfetti and Pearson and Spiro that reflected the thinking of the time on reading comprehension instruction. In this article, the author reviews the general direction of those contributions in light of current thinking and offers a model for organizing the…

This article presents an interview with Dr. Sylvia O. Richardson, a pediatrician, speech-language pathologist, researcher, scholar, teacher, and clinician, who has been involved in the field of language-learning disabilities for many years. Widely-published in the areas of language disorders and dyslexia, and a former President of the American…

This paper discusses major principles characterizing the whole language philosophy of teaching and learning; assumptions of the mechanistic and relational paradigms; whole language practices such as the Shared Book Experience and Reading Recovery for helping students with reading difficulties; and the potential of whole language for developing…

This paper discusses the history of U.S. reading instruction; instructional approaches and learning processes; the whole language view of literacy acquisition; promoting literate behavior through reading to or writing with children, shared reading, and guiding children's reading/writing; and use of the whole language approach with…

This article describes an integrated augmentative and alternative communication and literacy intervention program developed for five adults with autism in a supported employment facility. Three detailed case studies describe approaches used with project participants who had emerging, beginning, and more advanced levels of communication and…

A program for language learning-disabled students is described that uses a whole language philosophy to structure contexts that develop students' pragmatic, semantic, syntactic, graphophonemic, and metacognitive abilities underlying speaking, listening, reading, and writing. This paper describes the program environment, children, thematic…

Learning to read is a complex process and a number of factors affect a child's success in beginning reading. This complexity increases when a child's home language differs from that of the school and when the child comes from a home with limited economic resources. This article discusses factors that have been shown to contribute to children's…

This article considers classroom instruction in reading and writing for children with severe speech and physical impairments (e.g., cerebral palsy). A model of classroom instruction (involving teacher characteristics, context, process, and product) is offered, effective instructional strategies are identified, and recommendations are made to…

The Simple View of Reading (P. B. Gough & W. Tunmer, 1986; W. A. Hoover & P. B. Gough, 1990) provides a 2-component model of reading. Each of these 2 components, decoding and comprehension, is necessary for normal reading to occur. The Simple View of Reading provides a relatively transparent model that can be used by professionals not only to…