Automaticity in recognizing the words in a text is fundamental to comprehension. If the number of words readers need to stop and decode exceeds their ability to retain their understanding of a narrative's plot or an expository text's description, their comprehension suffers. The conventional intervention for students who lack the automaticity to…

This naturalistic basic interpretive inquiry study investigated what individual and social meanings students constructed while engaging with paired picture books presented in two different languages: One in English and the other in Arabic. The research aimed to uncover how middle grade male students interpreted and comprehended the narratives and…

Students with high reading proficiency typically achieve better results in science assessments, indicating the importance of reading proficiency. Since the process of reading is a complex interaction between properties of a text and a reader, the linguistic demands of a text might affect text comprehension. Certain linguistic features, such as…

The goal of this study was to determine the effect of setting a delay between reading a text and answering comprehension questions on "when"-to-search and "what"-to-search decisions in a task-oriented reading environment. Fifty-five eighth-grade students were randomly divided into two groups. One group read one text, answered…

This research replicates an earlier study and extends it by shifting instructional responsibility from researchers to special education teachers, who implemented reading instruction that included multisyllabic word decoding, academic vocabulary, and three comprehension strategies (generating main ideas, comparing and contrasting people and events,…

This research replicates an earlier study (O'Connor, Beach, Sanchez, Bocian, & Flynn, 2015) and extends it by shifting instructional responsibility from researchers to special education teachers, who implemented reading instruction that included multisyllabic word decoding, academic vocabulary, and three comprehension strategies (generating…

The current study models reader, item, and word contributions to the lexical representations of 39 morphologically complex words for 172 middle school students using a crossed random-effects item response model with multiple outcomes. We report 3 findings. First, results suggest that lexical representations can be characterized by separate but…

The author created a lesson in which students successfully practiced reading comprehension skills while developing an understanding of earthquakes. Not only did this lesson help students gain an understanding of the impact of earthquakes, a subject embedded into Missouri's eighth-grade science curriculum, but it also addresses one of the new…

Close reading is an instructional practice that has gained attention of late. It involves reading a complex text, annotation, and repeatedly reading to answer text-dependent questions. Although there are a number of recommendations for the use of close reading, there has not been a systematic analysis of student or teacher perceptions of this…

Online texts present unique challenges to readers, requiring them to interact with texts in ways that differ from their interactions with static, print texts (Kress, 2003; 2010; McKenna, 2003; Reinking, 1998). Due to the multimodal, multilayered, and nonlinear nature of online texts, readers may also employ strategies when they read online,…

This study investigated the reading behavior of 15-year-old students while reading texts and answering corresponding multiple-choice questions. The availability of the texts during question answering was manipulated experimentally. Allocation of resources to several cognitive processes at the word, sentence, and text level was measured by…

Children ages 2-18 spend between two and four hours per day watching TV, a calculation that is even higher if DVDs, videos and the Internet are included. Although the amount of television watched by today's children has raised concerns about their literacy development, captions could hold a key to turning television into an educational asset.…

Secondary-level students from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds who struggle with reading need strategies for aligning new information with their previous knowledge as well as for obtaining and retaining essential information from the text. Important components of all secondary literacy support must include instruction in…

In developing a tool to help address academic language development, the author and his team began by identifying the challenges of presenting science text to English Language Learners and students who struggle with reading. The goal was to balance the practical and logistical challenges of identifying, teaching, and learning academic and content…

When the author asked her eighth-grade students to list some reading strategies, they were well prepared to answer her. But when she asked them how they knew they did not understand what they were reading--in other words, how they knew they need to use these reading strategies--they were unable to produce an explanation. She launched an action…