Making inferences is essential to comprehending text. Teachers can ask inferential questions, model their thinking, and teach specific strategies to support upper elementary students in making inferences while reading.

This article revisits the legacy of Ken Goodman, specifically his work on African American Language and reading. In this body of scholarship, Goodman and like-minded scholars entered a fray of competing interests, political agendas, and economic stakes, which continue to plague current debates about the teaching of reading. To make sense of…

Research has demonstrated the positive effects of systematically teaching phonemic awareness and phonics in kindergarten and first grade, but many commonly used reading curricula do not adequately incorporate these foundational skills. In this study, we examined the efficacy of an instructional program ("UFLI Foundations") in…

Reading fluency has been a tenacious problem in our schools. Studies have addressed the national decline in reading fluency in elementary schools. Tennessee's data outlines a similar pattern of findings. Approximately one third of Tennessee students complete third grade without becoming fluent readers (Tennessee Department of Education, 2023). New…

Reading Recovery (RR) was introduced throughout New Zealand during the 1980s, for children struggling the most with learning to read after 1 year of formal schooling. In May 2024, the Minister of Education decided the programme would no longer be funded beyond 2024. This decision was based on evidence that the programme was not as effective as…

Early reading materials are replete with pictures. Pictures purportedly improve reading comprehension and motivation; however, the simultaneous presentation of pictures and text can also impede textual control for some readers. Attempts to remediate restricted stimulus control in picture-text compounds suggest that omitting the picture element is…

Reading comprehension is contingent on both oral language comprehension and word-level reading ability, skills that are thought to be intrinsically related in the early school years. However, while previous studies examining bidirectional relationships among oral vocabulary and reading development have generally found an association between word…

Teachers frequently reach for leveled readers to help facilitate their guided reading groups; however, there can be limits in using these leveled readers. One such limit relates to enjoyment and engagement. An answer to this is using TOON books during guided reading time. TOON books are graphic novel leveled readers and were created in response to…

This article describes a comprehensive framework (iDISC) for the close reading of informational texts for elementary students that may need additional language, social, memory, or behavioral supports. The article introduces concrete tools that are used before, during, and after close reading, including cue-cards, language stems, discussion…

Elementary school students are often placed into groups with peers of similar reading ability for leveled guided reading instruction. Through this practice, students are differentially exposed to reading skills, strategies, and texts that are presumed to match their reading ability. This widespread practice is problematic given that (1) current…

Reading proficiency levels among elementary-aged students in the United States have been alarmingly unsatisfactory for decades. The absence of basic foundational reading skills will induce struggles in every other subject area, causing students to feel exhausted, defeated, and fall behind. Intervention can be successful when instruction is…

Reading tutoring is a traditional technique to support the development of young readers. One relatively popular method of tutoring involves pairing a lower level reader with a higher level reader to synchronously read connected text aloud. We use the term Synchronous Paired Oral Reading Techniques (SPORT) to describe a family of related methods…

Background and Aims: Students with intellectual disability benefit from high-quality instruction in reading and mathematics. Methods: This Theoretical Paper outlines the need for effective, evidence-based instructional practices for this population and the potential for observation research to inform such advancements. We report our systematic…

This experimental study investigates the effects of retelling, reading response, and combined retelling and reading response activities that second-grade students participated in after watching digital stories on their reading attitudes and narrative comprehension levels. In this pre-test--post-test control group design, 140 students, composed of…

Literature circles are a socially supportive context in which students can cultivate their reader identities. This is especially promising for students with lower reader self-efficacies. This qualitative multiple case study explored the positioning practices of four Grades 5-6 students with comparatively low reader self-efficacy. In literature…