Students in England sit an important gateway examination in English at age 16. Major changes were made to this exam in 2017 resulting in more emphasis on the comprehension of unseen literary texts. This paper uses corpus linguistic methods to identify the kind of vocabulary encountered in these exam texts and compares it to the kind of vocabulary…

Challenges associated with reading in the disciplines are well documented. In this article, we report on a small-scale study that was part of a larger school-university design-based research collaboration focused on improving literacy learning in Australian high schools. We discuss Paired Wide Reading (PWR), an instructional innovation designed to…

The fields of vocabulary instruction, literacy professional development, and global language issues framed this research. Situated in Iceland, the intervention consisted of professional development for 10th-grade teachers focused on academic words in various subject materials, increasing the learners' proficiency in using explicit strategies to…

The digital reading practices of two middle school students in US and Canadian contexts are examined. Using a multimodal discourse framework, the authors contemplate what digital reading practice is and distinctive practices of reading texts online compared with printed, school-based literacy practices. By focusing on two different genres of…

This commentary explores a central issue for our times, online reading comprehension. It first defines three issues that have largely gone unnoticed as the Internet enters our classrooms: (1) literacy has become deictic; (2) effective online information use requires additional online reading comprehension practices, skills, and dispositions; and…

In this study the author charts the trajectory of an adolescent student's identity, from being a struggling reader to a competent reader and successful young actor. The author argues that reading is central to our ability to make sense of both our inner selves and our surroundings, and that it is therefore imperative that unskilled readers are…

Finds that Chilean students (grades 4-8) rarely related what they were reading to what they had just read, integrated meanings assigned to the text with prior knowledge, or used textual cues to attain a coherent interpretation. Finds that these problems are related to methods of reading instruction, opportunities they are given to develop…

Discusses the deterioration of reading culture in Hungary over the past 15 years. Notes increases in television viewing, decreases in achievement and in reading comprehension, and changes in amount and types of materials read. Notes hopeful evidence of relative improvement of reading. Characterizes some important trends (practical, commercial, and…