In educational settings, students read for multiple purposes, such as preparing for an exam, practicing a new reading strategy, writing an essay, and more. Because reading is a goal-directed activity, providing students with task instructions can help them create goals for reading and develop a plan to meet these goals. In the current experiment,…

Many digital reading applications have built-in features to control the presentation flow of texts by segmenting those texts into smaller linguistic units. Whether and how these segmentation techniques affect the readability of texts is largely unknown. With this background, the current study examined a recent proposal that a sentence-by-sentence…

We examined the associations between teachers' knowledge of language and literacy constructs, perceived ability to teach early literacy skills, instructional practice, and students' early reading outcomes. The results showed that teacher knowledge predicted quality of instruction, but neither quality of instruction nor teacher knowledge were…

Professional development (PD) of teachers working with students in the first years of learning to read is a privileged way of preventing initial reading difficulties and its effects in the long and short term. This research studies the effects of PD in student reading performance, although the results are not conclusive with regard to which PD…

We examined the relations between mothers' reading skills, home literacy environment (HLE), and children's emergent literacy skills and word reading and whether their relations vary across urban and rural contexts in China. Four hundred third-year kindergarten Chinese children (M[subscript age] = 74.50 ± 3.77 months) were recruited from Jining (N…

Quantifying the decoding difficulty (i.e., 'decodability') of text is important for accurately matching young readers to appropriate text and scaffolding reading development. Since no easily accessible, quantitative, word-level metric of decodability exists, we developed a decoding measure (DM) that can be calculated via a web-based scoring…

By April 2020 public schools throughout the country closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On the brink of these turbulent times, we concluded a larger survey study describing first grade literacy instruction in February 2020. Having documented a year of pre-pandemic literacy instruction, we then reached out to the same participants to report on…

In the Netherlands, the quality of the reading curriculum is currently under debate because of disappointing results on national and international assessments of students' reading skills and motivation. In a mixed-method study, we analyzed the content of Dutch textbooks for reading comprehension instruction (i.e., the implemented curriculum) and…

Reading strategies have been documented as beneficial facilitators for readers to understand text; their potential efficacy, however, has not yet adequately assessed among struggling readers in the context of a large number of students below grade level at secondary schools internationally. Using a pretest-posttest control group experimental…

We examined the cognitive, language, and instructional factors associated with reading ability in Williams syndrome (WS). Seventy 9-year-olds with WS completed standardized measures of real-word reading, pseudoword decoding, reading comprehension, phonological skills, listening comprehension, nonverbal reasoning, visual-spatial ability, verbal…

Teaching vocabulary and reading comprehension during social studies instruction is critical for reading development and the acquisition of content knowledge. This study systematically investigated how elementary teachers integrate vocabulary and reading comprehension instruction during social studies teaching, as well as the extent to which this…

The study investigated teachers' knowledge of reading comprehension processes and reading comprehension instruction. The study was carried out among teachers (N = 65) in Estonia. The content analysis classified qualitative data from semi-structured interviews as quantitative data. The results showed that teachers' content knowledge about reading…

As readers struggle to coordinate various reading- and language-related skills during oral reading fluency (ORF), miscues can emerge, especially when processing complex texts. Following a miscue, students often self-correct as a strategy to potentially restore ORF and online linguistic comprehension. Executive functions (EF) are hypothesized to…

Word boundary information is not marked explicitly in Chinese sentences and word ambiguity happens in Chinese texts. This introduces difficulty to parse characters into words when reading Chinese sentences, especially for beginning readers. In an eye-tracking study, we tested whether explicit word boundary information as provided by alternating…

Reading is a complex task that requires cognitive and emotional engagement. The integrated instruction approach, incorporating strategy instruction and literature circles, was developed to improve Chinese students' reading comprehension, reading motivation, and strategy use in reading fiction books. The current study adopted a quasi-experimental…