In "Teaching with Literacy Programs," Patricia A. Edwards, Kristen L. White, Laura J. Hopkins, and Ann M. Castle present a model that allows educators to address educational inequity through the critical and adaptive use of existing literacy curriculum materials. In this accessible work, they advise educators on ways to combine common…

This exploratory study examined the nature of instruction provided in two reading intervention programs designed for elementary-grade students with dyslexia (The Multisensory Teaching Approach and Reading RULES!). In addition to documenting the proportion of time dedicated to particular content components (i.e., letter-name knowledge, phonological…

From 2006 the British government strongly favoured synthetic phonics as the principal approach for the teaching of initial literacy in state-funded primary schools in England, and since 2010 has made it mandatory. In 2007-2013 just over 100 commercially published phonics schemes were available, and in that same period the government maintained a…

In this article, Charlie Taylor offers a commentary on Yang et al.'s 2021 "Reading in a Foreign Language" article, "Text Difficulty in Extensive Reading: Reading Comprehension and Reading Motivation." In their study, Yang et al. analyzed the effects of text difficulty on the reading comprehension and motivation of high school…

In February 2016, the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) pulled together stakeholders from across the state and set an ambitious goal--that at least 75 percent of third graders would be proficient readers by 2025. The goal originated from both stagnant third grade reading scores in the state and national research indicating that third grade…

In May 2016 an Invitational Symposium on the Reading for Understanding (RfU) Initiative was held in Alexandria, Virginia. Co-hosted by ETS and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the symposium brought together 160 state and local education leaders to examine the results of the RfU initiative. The goal of the U.S. Department of…

In this article, we discuss research supporting the Strategic Instruction Model's™ (SIM) effort to address higher order reasoning and thinking skills in two lines of programmatic research. We review the extant body of evidence supporting the two lines of the SIM library, the Content Enhancement Routines and a comprehensive reading program, and the…

The purpose of this study was to explore the operations of a sample of university-based reading clinics in order to better understand their functions and practices and to inform the planning for the authors' own clinic. This study was carried out in two phases. In Phase I, the authors conducted Internet searches and contacted knowledgeable…

Since "Reading Power" was launched ten years ago in an elementary school in Vancouver, it has evolved into a recognized approach to comprehension instruction being implemented across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and China. This groundbreaking approach shows teachers how to help students think while they…

Historically, political debates have broken out over how to teach reading in primary schools and infant classrooms. These debates and "reading wars" have often resulted from public concerns and media reportage of a fall in reading standards. They also reflect the importance placed on learning to read by parents, teachers, employers, and…

The Extensive Reading Foundation's bibliography now boasts over 530 articles with "Extensive Reading" in the title. About 35% of this rich and diverse body of papers were published in the past decade. A meta-review of this literature shows it is quite fragmented as evidenced by considerable variability in the conceptualization of…

This article presents findings on teachers' implementation of a reading reform in an urban school district. Findings are based in observation, interview, and document data related to 12 elementary teachers' responses to a new reading program, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Workshop. Utilizing coupling theory and the concept of routines,…

As teachers struggle to balance the needs of their students with the requirements of commercial reading materials, educators need to consider how teachers will create space for children's literature in today's classrooms. In this article, 10 practical recommendations for incorporating children's literature in the reading instructional framework…

One quality indicator of intervention research is the extent to which the intervention has a high degree of social validity, or practicality. In this study, I drew on Wolf's framework for social validity and used qualitative methods to ascertain five middle schoolteachers' perceptions of the social validity of System 44®--a phonics-based reading…

"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life." This popular Chinese proverb is an apt metaphor for the dilemma faced by principals and curriculum coordinators when deciding whether to purchase a scripted commercial reading program. Although a scripted reading program may solve…