Students in grades 3-6 need to use increasingly sophisticated comprehension skills and strategies as they read and build knowledge across disciplinary content areas. Grounded in research, this book presents effective practices for integrating literacy instruction with literature, science, and social studies. Chapters address text selection,…

The current study examined the impact of translanguaging on second language reading comprehension. The study involved an experimental and a control group. The participants in the experimental group (n = 38) were offered four opportunities to engage Arabic -- their first language -- in comprehending a text in English. These occasions for…

Reading comprehension questions scaffold deeper comprehension, help students to analyze texts, improve students' thinking skills, and help them realize permanent and meaningful learning. By comparing reading comprehension questions used in Turkish lessons with student-generated comprehension questions in terms of level, this study aimed to…

This study applied Edmodo as a supplementary environment for additional language practice in a semi-technical English course in an EFL context, with a quasi-experimental between-subjects (control versus experimental group) design. In addition to conventional classroom instruction and practice, the experimental group practiced additional language…

Multilingualism in education is encouraged in South Africa, and children are expected to become bilingual and biliterate during the early primary grades. Much focus has been placed on measuring literacy in children's first language, often the medium of instruction (MOI), and English, the language typically used as MOI from fourth grade. However,…

More than 50% of fourth graders in the United States are reading below a proficient level, with more than 75% of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch scoring lower than the U.S. average reading score. A framework of background knowledge is essential for vocabulary acquisition so the reader can comprehend the meaning of a text.…

Repeated viewing of the same video is a common strategy among autonomous language learners as well as a much used pedagogical strategy among foreign language (FL) teachers. Learners may watch the same video more than once, to increase global comprehension of the target language or to focus their attention on linguistic aspects, such as new…

Second language (L2) writing has been determined to be influenced by what is read, with language learners tending to borrow words and short phrases from input texts while writing (e.g., Wang & Wang, 2015). This phenomenon is referred to as lexical alignment. Only one empirical study has investigated the influence that the linguistic complexity…

Despite research demonstrating the importance of language comprehension to later reading abilities, curriculum-based measures to assess language comprehension abilities in preschoolers remain lacking. The Assessment of Story Comprehension (ASC) features brief, child-relevant stories and a series of literal and inferential questions with a focus on…

This quasi-experimental investigation describes the influence of text signals on second language expository science text comprehension. In two course sections, mixed proficiency Korean English language learners (n = 88) read one of two print-based English expository text passage versions. Participants in one section (n = 44) were given a version…

Reader's Theater is a transformative and influential instructional tool for reading with far-reaching benefits for all students. Teachers are critical players in the use of Readers Theater in classroom; the effects of Reader's Theater are a direct result of a teacher's involvement. These effects include an increase in word recognition, fluency,…

Automated text complexity measurement tools (also called readability metrics) have been proposed as a way to help teachers, textbook publishers, and assessment developers select texts that are closely aligned with the new, more demanding text complexity expectations specified in the Common Core State Standards. This article examines a critical…

Reading research has recognized the strong relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension. However, we are still perplexed by the precise nature of how readers access and retrieve word meanings while reading. We have not reached a consensus on "what it means to know a word" (e.g., Anderson & Nagy, 1991; Nation, 2001) or…

Recently researchers have begun exploring the efficacy of interventions designed to improve text comprehension skills for students with developmental disabilities (DD). Text comprehension is essential for understanding academic content as students with disabilities make progress in the general education curriculum. This article focuses on single…

The present studies examined the effects of varying degrees of unfamiliar vocabulary within written discourse on individuals' abilities to use linguistic context for the purposes of translation and comprehension (i.e., lexical inferencing). Prose varied in the number of foreign words introduced into each sentence (e.g., 0 through 7 content words…