Background: Adapting instruction to individual students' needs is known to be effective, but there is a lack of evidence whether students' reading skills are associated with literacy instruction activities at classroom-level. Both the content of the literacy instruction and teachers' instructional support through instructional management are…

Background: We examine effects on oral reading fluency (defined as automatic word recognition and prosody) when phrase-cued text (defined as marking the phrase boundaries in text) is layered on to readers theatre, an evidence-based instructional format that includes multiple readings over a period of about 5 days as students practice and prepare…

Background: Evidence indicates that fluent readers automatically decompose morphologically complex words. However, few studies have directly compared processing of stimuli comprising different types of morphemes, particularly bound and free morphemes. Methods: Eighty fluently reading young adults participated in a lexical decision task with word…

Background: Most previous studies of teaching styles and reading skills have been cross-sectional. Longitudinal research is needed to clarify the direction of effects. The present longitudinal study examined the degree to which differences in teaching styles in the third grade predict the sixth-grade reading performance. The consistency of the…

Background: Connectives, such as "because" or "although," explicitly indicate how to semantically link individual segments of a text. Knowledge of connectives has been shown to significantly contribute to variance explanation in comprehension of English and Dutch texts, particularly amongst monolingual students and students…

In this quasi-experimental study, the researchers examined the effects of implementing Readers Theatre in a second grade classroom, comprised of seven and eight-year-old students. The 70 subjects were chosen as a non-probability sample from two different classes and served as the treatment (n = 29) and comparison (n = 41) groups. A repeated…

There are many established reading strategy training programmes, which explicitly teach strategic and meta-cognitive knowledge to improve reading comprehension. Although instruction in strategy knowledge leads to improvements in meta-cognitive skills, the effects do not always transfer to reading comprehension. Therefore, to investigate…

Presents three studies where children in mainstream schools compared text on white paper with identical text covered in turn by each of 10 differently-colored plastic overlays. Shows consistency with regard to the proportion of children in mainstream education who report beneficial perceptual effects with colored overlays and who demonstrate…