In England, several developments combine in powerful ways to sustain certain ideas about literacy and research in education. These include the promotion of a specific model of 'evidence-based practice', frameworks for initial teacher education and early career professional development, and a strong accountability framework via inspection. However,…

As more states continue to call for reforms of reading education and mandate the adoption of standards aligned with the science of reading, educator preparation programs are reviewing and redesigning their curricula. In this paper, faculty from our Department of Elementary and Special Education share some potential challenges, successes, and…

Arguably, the most contentious debate in the field of eye movement control in reading has centered on whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel during reading. Chinese is character-based and unspaced, meaning the issue of how lexical processing is operationalized across potentially ambiguous, multicharacter strings is not…

Throughout the 20th century, a limited number of scholarly oriented books and monographs were issued that should have had great influence on later theory, research, and praxis associated with the college reading and study strategies field. Yet, these works have been, at least to some extent, lost to the winds of time. The lessons that can be…

Across a carefully detailed argument, the shortcomings, inconsistencies and contradictions of the government's recent "Reading Framework" are made clear in the light of a substantial body of academic research on the nature of reading and the development of literacy. The dogmatic approach taken towards these issues by government and by…

We segment what we read into meaningful events, each separated by a discrete boundary. How does event segmentation during encoding relate to the structure of story information in long-term memory? To evaluate this question, participants read stories of fictional historical events and then engaged in a postreading verb arrangement task. In this…

Since 2018, there has been an increase in the use of the term "Science of Reading" (SoR), which is a method of teaching reading that is connected to an understanding of reading and reading development that aligns with scientific research (Shanahan, 2020). Teachers who are new to the classroom may be unfamiliar with SoR and teaching…

This article discusses developing special education teacher candidates who have a solid knowledge of scientifically aligned reading practices. Challenges in preservice teacher education are presented, including alignment of course work and clinical experiences to the robust evidence base in reading science. Key questions and resources are…

Purpose: This study aims to examine whether binocular vision plays a facilitating or impeding role in lexical processing during sentence reading in Chinese. Method: Adopting the revised boundary paradigm, we orthogonally manipulated the parafoveal and foveal viewing conditions (monocular vs. binocular) of target words (high- vs. low-frequency)…

Purpose: In the Fall of 2019, Marietta College and Marietta City Schools, in Marietta, Ohio, piloted a program to improve literacy knowledge and pedagogy through completing LETRS training, a two-year literacy professional development based on the science of reading, as peers. Design/methodology/approach: This project was aligned to effective…

This essay describes my personal experience as a doctoral candidate collecting data for my dissertation during the COVID-19 pandemic. After providing the context for my own study, I lay out three main ideas that emerged while collecting data. These main ideas involve including participants in the decision-making process, sharing one another's…

Previous research in alphabetic languages has shown that both position (external, internal) and distance (adjacent, nonadjacent) modulate letter position encoding during reading. To examine the generality of this pattern for a comprehensive model of word recognition and reading, we examined these effects during Chinese reading (i.e., an unspaced…

Purpose: Readers can draw on their knowledge of sound-to-letter mappings to form expectations about the spellings of known spoken words prior to seeing them in written sentences. The current study asked whether such orthographic expectancies are observed in the absence of contextual support at the point of reading. Method: Seventy-eight adults…

Reading is a very complex task in which readers obtain information to promote reading from not only the fixated word located in the foveal area but also non-fixated words located in the parafoveal area. We aimed to investigate the second language (L2) parafoveal orthographic (letter identity and letter position) processing mechanism adopting the…

While previous research has provided insights into vocabulary learning through extensive reading, the differential effects of word frequency and word class on active form and passive meaning word recognition remain less understood. By evaluating learners' post-test performance in active form recognition and passive meaning recognition, this study…