This article offers an update on key developments in research related visual literacy, children's reading and children's literature. Beginning with an overview of the field, we chart several distinctive 'turns' or research trajectories: the aesthetic, the intercultural or empathic, and the ethical. We then consider how questions of power,…

In this collective essay the authors consider the nature and consequences of reading and researching across difference in an international and intergenerational team, whose core members are focused on understanding how curriculum operates and the nature of textbook representation of diversity in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau.…

Two recent articles from authors in Britain have attempted to show that the evidence in favour of systematic phonics in initial literacy instruction is weak; here, their arguments are disputed. Bowers ('Reconsidering the evidence that systematic phonics is more effective than alternative methods of reading instruction', "Educational…

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,…

Studies on the reading acquisition of deaf children investigate the similarities and differences in the reading process between these readers and typical hearing readers. There is no consensus on the nature of the reading process among deaf readers, whether they use the same reading processing strategies as typical readers or depend on other…

Here I present 'stories of reading' as a model that takes account of the way an actual reader, together with other readers in a group, reacts to a text as part of an interpretive event. I demonstrate the model through the shared reading and discussion, by a non-academic group of Israeli women, of a Hebrew translation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's…

The Ontario Human Rights Commission's (OHCR) "Right to Read Report" calls for school districts to implement early literacy interventions that have been scientifically proven to be effective for young children with reading difficulties. The acknowledgment of early intervention as an essential service for young children experiencing…

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…

Background: The teaching of reading or reading instruction has largely been carried out in terms of well-developed pedagogies in the field. These pedagogical approaches are, however, derived from research and development in a broad international context, and are often adopted by and implemented in various country settings. Given the contextual…

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…

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)…

Hu and Nation's (2000) study, which stipulated that second language (L2) readers need to be familiar with 98% of lexical items for adequate text comprehension, has become highly influential in L2 vocabulary research and pedagogy. However, the 98% critical threshold figure is based on findings from a research project in which a regression analysis…

More than fifteen million native Chinese-speaking children are at risk for reading difficulties (RD), making effective Chinese reading interventions crucial for enhancing individual and societal well-being. A total of 51 studies from 2,015 children aged 6 to 13 years were included in the current meta-analysis to examine what works for reading…

Academic language and its associations with school success have been established in many prior studies. However, the scholarship lacks research on the mechanisms that constitute these relations. This study investigates the mediating role of motivational-­affective variables, specifically reading self-concept and reading enjoyment, in relations…

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…