This paper questions the "science of reading" as offering a secure bridge to practice and instead argues for socio-cultural grounded forms of best practicing. The paper argues for a shift from viewing curriculum as generic and standardized to viewing it as particular and generative--requiring formative and dynamic approaches to design.…

"Literacy Research: Illuminating the Future," was the conference theme. The theme highlighted paradigmatic, theoretical, methodological and substantive diversity that embraced a full gamut of perspectives and approaches to make sense of and advocate for literacy. Over 1,100 attendees gathered in Tampa, Florida to share and discuss the…

This article is a generous invitation to literacy researchers globally to follow the Black literacy tradition that has saved the minds, bodies, and souls of Black folks as well as fellow human beings throughout the world. Where will this lead? We see the post-White turn and post-White futures for all. This is a celebrated departure from our racial…

This systematic review aims to synthesize the literature on the effects of cross-linguistic transfer on Spanish/English bilinguals' reading comprehension skills. The search yielded at least 90 studies in which participants were Spanish/English bilinguals aged birth to Grade 12. Researchers assessed participants' decoding and/or linguistic…

Some children experience more difficulty than others becoming literate, often at great emotional, intellectual, social, and economic cost to themselves, but also to those who love and care for them, and for society at large. The causes of those difficulties and what to do about them have been the source of much research and sometimes heated…

This paper presents evidence confirming the validity of the RD design in the Reading Recovery study by examining the ability of the RD design to replicate the 1st grade results observed in the original i3 RCT focused on short-term impacts. Over 1,800 schools participated in the RD study over all four cohort years. The RD design used cutoff-based…

The following semi-autobiographical essay tells a cautionary tale about the entrenched Anglocentrism, Eurocentrism, and Alphabetism in reading and reading disabilities (dyslexia) research. Having been born, raised, and educated in an entirely monolingual English-speaking environment, I later migrated to a country where non-European languages…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) can be used to score oral reading fuency (ORF) assessments to ameliorate current inadequacies (e.g., administration errors, high opportunity cost), and represents an important part of a larger solution to improve traditional ORF. But more research is needed on how ASR performs for diverse student groups. The…

The effects of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation and the publication of the National Reading Panel (NRP) report profoundly affected how reading is taught in public schools as well as how program effectiveness is evaluated. The disequilibrium that resulted from state and federal mandates governing reading instruction set the stage for the…

To examine the difference in attention capacity when reading difficult or easy text, a study presented text that varied in difficulty to 22 subjects via a computer monitor. The text was presented in a self-paced manner, one word at a time. Reading times for each word were obtained by computing latencies between key presses. Whenever a flashing…

Both psychologists and reading specialists have been interested in whether words are processed letter by letter or in larger units. A reaction time paradigm was used to evaluate these options with interest focused on potential units of word recognition which might be functional within single syllable words. The basic paradigm involved presenting…

The metacognitive aspects of reading include knowledge about and regulation of the mental processes involved. The knowledge component includes self-knowledge, which is awareness of personal strengths and weaknesses, and task-knowledge, which is awareness of the characteristics of the task and appropriate strategies for dealing with them. The…

Four responses to speeches regarding William S. Gray presented at the May 9, 1985, Annual Convention of the International Reading Association (IRA) are presented in this paper. Gray--whose accomplishments include his association with the University of Chicago from 1912 (student) to his death in 1960 (Professor Emeritus); his pioneering work in the…

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that readers make inferences if those inferences are necessary for the reconstruction of the writer's model. Each experiment involved the same 42 subjects who read a series of short passages. The first experiment examined inferences pertaining either to the underlying global situation of a…

This paper describes the Harris-Jacobson Readability Formula A, a revision of a readability formula based on word lists from "Basic Elementary Reading Vocabularies." Section one of the paper discusses procedures for using the formula, including the selection of samples, scoring the variables, and applying the formula. The next section…