Increasingly, children enter the school system with a home language that differs from the language of the majority. Consequently, classrooms have students with diverse language backgrounds and teachers must develop reading comprehension instruction that meets the needs of all their students. To successfully plan instruction, it is critical for…

Developing phonological knowledge of students is believed to be beneficial to reading development. This paper reviews selected eight articles on the issue of phonological knowledge and reading development in both native and English as Second Language (ESL) context. In finding the trends and patterns across all eight articles, the content and…

In our increasingly diverse schools, students bring diverse ways of speaking to the classroom. In turn, as features from students' home language varieties transfer into their readings of texts, teachers' assessment and intervention plans may be directly affected. If teachers conflate dialect influence with reading error in Standard English, they…

This review synthesizes research on English reading outcomes of all types of programs for Spanish-dominant ELLs in elementary school. It is divided into two major sections: the effect of language of instruction on achievement (i.e., bilingual vs. English-only instruction) and effective reading approaches for ELLs other than the use of native…