Reports on a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with the parents of 15 "precocious" readers during their child's time in Key Stage 1. Notes the parents were interviewed three times: once each academic year. Concludes there are important lessons to be learned from these parents; however, as the parents of children with a precocious…

Examines relative importance of both static and dynamic measures of cognitive-processing abilities and emergent print knowledge in first-grade children. Finds growth in cognitive-processing abilities and general knowledge about print could be measured and adequately modeled. Suggests a strong association between the rate of growth in cognitive…

Investigates whether two groups of 6-year-old beginning readers taught to read by a phonics and by a "book experience" non-phonics approach would differ in reading comprehension as well as the processes of word recognition. Finds that the non-phonics approach taught children much faster reading reaction times to familiar words but they scored…

Administers a phonological task to 34 English-speaking grade 2 children (attending a bilingual English-Hebrew elementary school) to tap sensitivity to a phonemic contrast that occurs productively in Hebrew but is phonotactically constrained in English. Concludes a general level of phonological ability is required for reading to develop but that…

Address the development of a literature review that summarizes what educators know about the role of the reading specialist and the various roles that reading specialists assume. Examines journals in the field of reading research and instruction, government documents, technical reports, and ERIC documents that related to the role of the reading…

In this article, we review the findings of Rona Flippo's (1998) "Expert Study" within the comparative context of recently published reading research reports such as the National Reading Panel report (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) and Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, &…

The best evidence on effective instruction that we can garner is fragile, often stripped of any external validity. Almost every curriculum scheme works in some sites, and none has ever worked well everywhere. That has been the finding time after time when state and federal educational initiatives have been evaluated. There is a useful role for…

The Anna Plan is a unique delivery model for enhancing schoolwide literacy instruction in the primary grades. Based on the principles of Reading Recovery and Four Blocks literacy instruction, it provides supplementary reading instruction through the distinctive use of teaching staff. Over six years, it has resulted in sweeping changes in the way…

This article's fundamental argument is that the reading instruction and reading research have been shaped by political forces desiring to privilege particular approaches to instruction or particular combinations of methodological and epistemological perspectives on research. The swings in both dominant pedagogies and dominant research paradigms…

Dudley-Marling discusses the nature of research in the teaching of reading and the possible connections between such research to teaching and to policy. He questions what he calls the "leitmotif" of federal education policy, specifically, the call for "scientifically based research" to determine reading teaching practices, arguing how such…

A large body of research (Clay 1991; National Reading Panel 2000; Pressley 2000; Courtney & Abodeeb 2001) on young readers reveals that most children do not know how to check their understanding as they read, nor do educators give them the strategies to do so. Comprehension is the process of constructing meaning while interacting with text.…

Early language competence in preschool relates both directly and indirectly to elementary school reading in both 1st and 3rd grades. Further, comprehensive language skills are more strongly related to early reading than are vocabulary scores alone. In response to a challenge by S. A. Bracken (2005), the current article reaffirms the National…

Reading researchers seek to discover exactly what kinds of information-processing activities go on in our minds when we read; to discover what the structure and organization is of the cognitive system skilled readers have acquired from learning to read. Little is known about how the most elaborate aspects of this system work, but much has been…

Secondary schools--be they middle schools or high schools--are reading-rich environments. Secondary schools provide contexts in which students must regularly read and write competently to demonstrate their literacy achievement. In any given semester, there are short stories and novels to read, comprehend, and analyze; civics and science texts…

To explore whether different balances of fiction/non-fiction reading and challenge might help explain differences in reading achievement between genders, data on 45,670 pupils who independently read over 3 million books were analysed. Moderate (rather than high or low) levels of challenge were positively associated with achievement gain, but…