Recently, the term "science of reading" has been used in public debate to promote policies and instructional practices based on research on the basic cognitive mechanisms of reading, the neural processes involved in reading, computational models of learning to read, and the like. According to those views, such data provide convincing…

The science of reading (SoR) is a term used for a body of evidence encompassing multi-disciplinary research from education, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. This evidence points to six key constructs that contribute to proficient reading: oral language, phonological awareness including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency,…

Application of psycholinguistic insights initiated a long career researching how children learn to read words. A theory was proposed claiming that spellings of individual words are stored in memory when their graphemes become bonded to phonemes in their pronunciations along with meanings, and this enables readers to read stored words automatically…

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…

The authors discuss the tension between the science of reading and adaptive teaching. The discussion focuses on the ways in which the science of reading emphasizes the teaching of reading as decontextualized and compartmentalized aspects of literacy acquisition that are distant from culturally sustaining and relevant pedagogies and restrict…

To learn to read, the brain must repurpose neural systems for oral language and visual processing to mediate written language. We begin with a description of computational models for how alphabetic written language is processed. Next, we explain the roles of a dorsal sublexical system in the brain that relates print and speech, a ventral lexical…

Quantifying the decoding difficulty (i.e., 'decodability') of text is important for accurately matching young readers to appropriate text and scaffolding reading development. Since no easily accessible, quantitative, word-level metric of decodability exists, we developed a decoding measure (DM) that can be calculated via a web-based scoring…

Our aim here is to investigate reading in a foreign language from a multilingual perspective. Much research has focused on first- and second-language reading, especially the important role played by strategy deployment in helping readers to make meaning from texts in different languages. Less emphasis has been placed, however, on how bilinguals…

We are very honored to have this great opportunity to interview Professor Paul Nation for the TEFLIN Journal's themed issue on Extensive Reading. Professor Paul Nation is an Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His special interests…

This study is an extension of Nahatame's (2018) research that demonstrated the effects of causal and semantic relations between sentences on second language (L2) text processing. Employing eye tracking, this study aimed to examine whether these effects appear during more natural, uninterrupted reading processes and to identify the time course of…

The purpose of this meta-analytic review was to investigate the relation between motivation and reading achievement among students in kindergarten through 12th grade. A comprehensive search of peer-reviewed published research resulted in 132 articles with 185 independent samples and 1,154 reported effect sizes (Pearson's r). Results of our…

Effective dictionary use facilitates reading and subsequently, vocabulary knowledge development. Reading, especially extensive reading, has time and again been proven to be highly effective for both receptive and productive lexical development. Possessing control over a large vocabulary is essential for language competence--be it L1, L2, or L3.…

The essays below were prepared following the LRA session organized by Janice Almasi entitled, "Examining the relative contributions of content knowledge and strategic processing to comprehension." What unites these essays are the personal and historical stances that each writer has taken; in addition, the essays are rich with…

One avenue for developing second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge is through Extensive Reading (ER). ER can provide opportunities for incidental learning to occur. Class time is often too restricted for sufficient attention to deliberate learning (Hunt & Beglar, 2005) meaning ER is important for L2 vocabulary development. This article builds…

A quarter century ago, Hanson (1989) asked, "Is reading different for deaf individuals?" (p. 85). Appealing to evidence available at the time, she argued that skilled deaf readers, like their hearing counterparts, relied on their knowledge of English structure, including phonological information. This perspective on the role phonology…