Writers know how easy it is to be seduced by their own cleverness. Words and ideas have a way of turning heads as they take on lives of their own. However, the time comes when good writers must harden their hearts, sharpen the axe, and murder their darlings. The same must be said of good scientists. Even more so than with writing, ethical…

For the past one hundred years, the American public has been entertained by the daily and the Sunday newspaper comic strips. The comics are now recognized as a legitimate and unique pop art form that chronicles the American culture. Research concerning reading interests and preferences provide evidence that the comics have a particular attraction…

Critical lessons that share a transactional view of early literacy development are synthesized. A transactional view of reading and writing means that literacy as a meaning construction process, and that within a given literacy event, both the text and the reader are changed.

In this article, Michael Pressley, Nell Duke, and Erica Boling call for a second generation of scientifically based reading instruction that goes beyond the evidence currently informing public policy. The authors argue that the federal government's position on what constitutes "scientific research" embraces only a narrow range of potentially…

In order to bridge the gap between available research and literature of best practice in reading and school library media program practice, the author developed an information literacy series for everyone. This article presents resources for best reading and school library media program practice. (Contains 2 resources.)

A. W. Inhoff, R. Radach, and B. Eiter (see EJ750907) argue that the current version of the E-Z Reader model (A. Pollatsek, E. D. Reichle, & K. Rayner, see EJ750906) cannot explain 2 key findings in their data, and as a result, the assumption of words being attended to 1 at a time is likely to be false. In this rejoinder, the authors argue that…

The "Little Books" are a set of books designed for interactive book reading between parents and children or teachers and students. The books use thematic topics familiar to children. They are written with high-frequency words and use simple phrases and sentences. They also have strong links between illustrations and text. One study of…

Only by exploring the past of the reading field can the literacy leaders of today make informed decisions about reading education in the future. This indispensable resource offers new insight into the development of reading education by examining the groundbreaking contributions of the "early reading pioneers"--16 reading researchers, reading…

Research indicates that repeated reading improves students' reading fluency. Although found to be effective, the underlying reading processes impacted by the intervention remains unclear. Two theoretical rationales, automatic word processing and the contextual linguistic effect, explaining repeated reading's effectiveness have been advanced in the…

Clump, Bauer, and Bradley (2004) and Burchfield and Sappington (2000) previously found extremely low levels of reading in undergraduate psychology courses. The current study investigated whether these low levels of reading are also found with graduate students, or if this value is altered by only investigating individuals who show continued…

This article explores why policy makers in England and Scotland responded so differently to the Clackmannanshire study on synthetic phonics. It suggests that a deeper understanding of the national and local policy contexts can explain Scotland's response. Analysis of the wider context of the Clackmannanshire initiative supports Moss and Huxford's…

This study investigates children's ability to utilize context cues (forward or backward), dictionary definitions (original or revised), or combinations of the two to understand unfamiliar words. Significant word gains were found for all treatments and reading skill levels. Revised definitions produced significantly greater gains than forward…

The researchers addressed two questions: (1) Does maternal reading mediation and family home literacy environment (HLE) relate to children's emergent literacy (EL) level? and (2) Do the relationships among these variables differ as a function of socioeconomic strata (SES) level. A total of 94 5-6-year-old children, 47 from low SES (LSES) and 47…

The nature of the memory processes that support language comprehension and the manner in which information packaging influences online sentence processing were investigated in three experiments that used eye-tracking during reading to measure the ease of understanding complex sentences in Korean. All three experiments examined reading of embedded…

In this concise, thought-provoking book, prominent researchers analyze existing knowledge on adolescent literacy, examine the implications for classroom instruction, and offer specific goals for future research. The volume reviews cutting-edge approaches to understanding the unique features of teaching and learning in secondary schools. Particular…