In this article, one teacher shares her journey using decodable books with her culturally and linguistically diverse students, documenting new understandings and tensions that she has encountered. Four literacy teacher educators augment the teacher's story by connecting it with the current literature on literacy and decodable books. After reading…

Understanding the early literacy abilities of children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is essential for designing and testing methods of reading intervention focused on printed orthography. School-based professionals need assessments that measure word reading skills of students with heterogenous speech and physical…

Reading comprehension--understanding, interpreting, and evaluating written texts--is a highly complex construct that involves ''the process of simultaneously constructing and extracting meaning through interaction and engagement with print'' (Snow, 2002, p. 413) and requires "the most intricate workings of the human mind" (Huey, 1968, p.…

Shifting demographics in K-12 schools have increased Spanish-speaking Multi-Language Learners' (MLLs') enrollment across the United States. While literacy variations between MLLs and proficient English speakers have been studied predominantly with upper elementary students, there remains a need for more exploration among early elementary…

In "Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives," leading literacy expert Timothy Shanahan curates a lively tour of the history of reading instruction in the United States, arguing that the most popular reading instruction method is failing students and suppressing their literacy achievement. He breaks down the reasons why teachers and researchers…

Individual differences in working memory (WM) influence reading skills. We aim to identify how different domains of WM explain reading performance, and how this association changes with age and reading expertise. Hungarian children from first to sixth grade took part in our study. The decoding skills of all children were assessed with 1-min word…

The current study used the network meta-analysis to investigate the effects of early reading interventions with different combinations of phonological processing, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension among students with reading difficulties (RD) in or before Grade 3. We aimed to test two reading intervention hypotheses: The…

This study investigated similarities and differences in children's (N = 83, grades 4-6) narrative comprehension between text, audio, and non-verbal video, including measures of both comprehension products and processes. The aim was to understand how children engage with information across various media and, in doing so, address inconsistent…

Purpose: Most studies about reading development in second-language learners have been carried out on children exposed to the second language from kindergarten. They have shown that decoding skills develop in a similar way to those of monolingual children. We wondered whether this holds for primary school newcomer non-native-speaking children. This…

The Poor Comprehender (PC) reading profile is characterised by difficulty comprehending text despite age-appropriate decoding skills. Risk for this profile is typically identified through static screening instruments measuring pre-existing knowledge, which may produce biased estimates for culturally and linguistically diverse children. In…

Guided by the Simple View of Reading (SVR considers reading comprehension as a product of decoding and listening comprehension) and the self-teaching hypothesis applied to Chinese (Li et al. in Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 24(3):252-263), this research examined (1) whether the SVR is applicable to L2 morphosyllabic Chinese;…

Assessments of reading and reading-related skills which measure acquired knowledge may pose problems for the prediction of future reading performance. Such static measures often result in floor effects in the early stages of reading instruction, and may be particularly inaccurate predictors for children from culturally and linguistically diverse…

Young children of Color from minoritized communities can co-author decodable stories using phonics skills they have been taught, their lived experiences, and home languages, including nondominant English languages, to develop decoding skills using student-generated decodable readers. While traditional and curricular decodable readers are used…

In many countries, children need to become proficient in both their home language (L1) and an international language, such as English (L2). Governments face tradeoffs in how to prioritize these two objectives. We provide empirical evidence on cross-linguistic transfer between L1 and L2, using the results of two randomized evaluations of Structured…

Background: Learning Progress Assessments (LPA) have been developed to help teachers individualize their curriculum. The use of LPA is facilitated by an increasing number of computerized LPA tools. However, little is known about student factors that influence the effectiveness of computerized LPA. Objectives: In this study, we explored whether a…