Research into "discourse synthesis" examines the ways in which writers make use of, and transform, multiple other texts in writing their own. It is intertextual research that has blurred boundaries of various kinds, not only the boundary between the processes of reading and writing but also boundaries across disciplines as well as…

Direct instruction of reading strategies, such as the 'structure strategy', is demonstrated to be effective for the development of more mature and skilled reading processes in struggling readers. This instructional intervention approach, aimed at directly improving reading ability, can be used in combination with text simplification. Text…

Orthographic knowledge is the understanding of how spoken language is represented in print. However, the terms used to describe the two levels of orthographic knowledge, lexical and sublexical orthographic knowledge, have been variably defined and inconsistently measured, potentially contributing to discrepancies in research findings.…

The primary objective of this special issue is to synthesize results from recent reading fluency research endeavors, and to link these findings to practical uses of reading curriculum-based measurement (R-CBM) tools. Taken together, the manuscripts presented in this issue discuss measurement work related to new metrics of indexing student reading…

Fluency and rate-based assessments, such as curriculum-based measurement, are frequently used to screen and evaluate student progress. The application of such measures are especially prevalent within special education and response to intervention models of prevention and early intervention. Although there is an extensive research and professional…

This paper provides a short overview of current issues in research on continuous reading in non-Roman orthographies. At the same time it also serves as an introduction to the present Reading and Writing Special Issue on this topic. The main questions examined in the contributions to this volume are closely related to issues that have been central…

A sample of Swahili-speaking probands with reading difficulties was identified from a large representative sample of 1,500 school children in the rural areas of Tanzania. Families of these probands (n = 88) were invited to participate in the study. The proband and his/her siblings received a battery of reading-related tasks and performance on…

A focused scientific research effort on writing research and its relationship to language development and reading is needed to address the writing and broader literacy needs of today's and tomorrow's learners and workers. In the United States, as well as in many other nations, research on writing has been neglected in relation to the emphasis on…

Genetic and environmental influences on prereading skills in preschool and on early reading and spelling development at the end of kindergarten were compared among samples of identical and fraternal twins from the U.S. (Colorado), Australia, and Scandinavia. Mean comparisons revealed significantly lower preschool print knowledge in Scandinavia,…

The focus of this article is recent CBM work that incorporates diagnostic reading assessment. The goal is to help general and special educators tailor more effective reading instruction for developing readers. The development process for this CBM diagnostic reading assessment is described; the resulting assessment is presented; and preliminary…

A growing reliance on research to guide decisions about reading instruction has resulted in a swing toward approaches that emphasize phoneme awareness and the relations between speech and alphabetic writing. Because this is a time of innovation and experimentation in the schools, and because the new emphasis has not won universal acceptance, there…

Suggests that students in upper elementary grades and high schools may benefit from extended decoding and spelling instruction, requiring strategies going well beyond phonics. Asserts that learning about morphological structure may provide the strategies needed to decode and spell multisyllabic words. Reviews literature providing a rationale for…

Describes the home and school literacy experiences of a group of children with severe motor and speech disabilities in order to examine the relationship between these experiences and reading and spelling abilities in this population. Finds that home literacy experiences in the groups studied at best had a marginal influence on reading development.…

To test the hypothesis that the etiology of reading difficulties may differ for males and females in more severely impaired samples, reading performance data from monozygotic (MZ), same-sex dizygotic (DZ[subscript ss]), and opposite-sex dizygotic (DZ[subscript os]) twin pairs were analyzed using a model-fitting implementation of the DeFries-Fulker…

The use of student assessment data is a key component of a model of instructional coaching, Student-Focused Coaching (Hasbrouck & Denton, 2005), designed to support student achievement by engaging reading teachers in a collaborative problem-solving process to modify instructional strategies with the goal of enhanced student outcomes. In this…