The purpose of this article is to look anew at the concepts of reading, reading development, and reading research as they exist beyond the boundaries of the "science of reading" controversy. The context for this reconceptualization is reading in the digital age and the challenges that today's readers confront daily. Those challenges…

Improving reading instruction is one of the hottest topics in K-12 education today. It is also one of the most complex, encompassing pedagogy, policy, and politics -- all rooted in a long history of arguments about the best way to teach kids to read. This analysis is a primer on the "Science of Reading" and efforts to implement it across…

Suggests that a new perspective is needed on the "great debate" in literacy instruction between whole language and phonics. Proposes an approach that integrates comprehension and decoding into a system designed around the principles of student-centered, authentic instruction in a socially engaging context. Considers the advantages of…

This report discusses how reading instruction should be modified to facilitate the development of comprehension strategies in all children (including those labeled as "at-risk" or "disadvantaged"). Current theoretical views of reading comprehension do not support a discrete skills perspective, but classroom research has…

A study examined two first-grade classrooms implementing the whole language approach and two utilizing the basal reading approach to determine the differences, if any, between the treatments. The hypothesis was that the whole language reading approach when combined with a phonics program would not result in higher test scores on a standardized…

A pilot tutor training project, the Student-Tutor Orientation (STO), was designed to meet the need for making whole-language concepts of reading and writing instruction accessible to tutors as well as students through hands-on experience and for establishing a collaborative tutoring relationship in which students share in decision making.…