This article describes how Readers Theatre was implemented as an engaging means for reading fluency instruction in a second-grade classroom. A weekly Readers Theatre format was utilized over the course of a school year. The format was added to the existing literacy program. Data collected during the school year revealed significant gains in…

Although text-based discussions are considered by many literacy researchers and educators to be optimal contexts for teaching students how to comprehend text, a discussion is an ill-structured instructional space with complicated demands. A challenge for teacher educators is to acknowledge this complexity and provide ways for teachers to learn how…

This study investigated the relative extent to which developing readers (6- and 9-year-olds) of English (deep) or Greek (transparent) orthography exhibit serial and exterior letter effects in letter position encoding. Participants were given a visual search task that required detection of a pre-specified target letter within a random five-letter…

This study examined the effects of passage and presentation order on progress monitoring assessments of oral reading fluency in 134 second grade students. The students were randomly assigned to read six one-minute passages in one of six fixed orders over a seven week period. The passages had been developed to be comparable based on readability…

Recent research has indicated that phonological neighbors speed processing in a variety of isolated word recognition tasks. Nevertheless, as these tasks do not represent how we normally read, it is not clear if phonological neighborhood has an effect on the reading of sentences for meaning. In the research reported here, we evaluated whether…

Objective: To determine the degree to which the medical humanities have been integrated into the fields of internal medicine and psychiatry, the authors assessed the presence of medical humanities articles in selected psychiatry and internal medicine journals from 1950 to 2000. Methods: The journals searched were the three highest-ranking…

Premier League Reading Stars (PLRS) is in its eighth year. To complement a pre-post quantitative survey, an impact evidence base was required to inform consideration of continued funding into 2011 and beyond. PLRS is very highly regarded among child participants, parents, and librarians. The structure of the scheme, its basis on football, and the…

Research into the factors that contribute to reading performance decrement in L2 reading among ESL university students is still being extensively researched in the context of ELT. This is because successful academic performance is highly dependent on good reading ability. While it is widely accepted that poor reading performance is due to lack of…

Repeated reading, a procedure involving repetition of the same text, has received copious attention from first language reading research providing highly converging evidence of its potency for reading fluency, accuracy, and comprehension. In contrast, second language research on repeated reading has been scarce. The very few studies extant have,…

Fluent reading is essential for successful comprehension. One dimension of reading fluency is reading rate, or reading speed. Because of the importance of reading fluency, fluency development activities should be incorporated into classroom practice. One activity that meets the fluency development conditions proposed by Nation (2007) is speed…

This paper briefly summarizes the literatures of reading and reasoning in the last quarter century, focusing mainly on the disciplines of cognitive science, cognitive developmental psychology, linguistics, and educational psychology. These literatures were synthesized to create a framework for defining verbal reasoning in higher education. Eight…

The aim of this study was to investigate gender differences in the relationship between reading ability, frequency of reading and attitudes and beliefs relating to reading and school. Two hundred and thirty-two 10-year-old children (117 male) completed a reading comprehension test and a questionnaire exploring the following areas: frequency of…

Despite a history of reading or spelling difficulties, some adults attain age-appropriate spelling skills and succeed at university. We compared the spelling of 29 such high-functioning dyslexics with that of 28 typical students, matched on general spelling ability, and controlling for vocabulary and non-verbal intelligence. Participants wrote…

The authors examined how motivational and cognitive variables predict reading comprehension, and whether each predictor variable adds unique explanatory power when statistically controlling for the others. Fourth-grade students (N = 205) completed measures of reading comprehension in September and December of the same year, and measures of…

Building crucial bridges between theory, research, and practice, this volume brings together leading authorities on the literacy development of young children. The "Handbook" examines the full range of factors that shape learning in and out of the classroom, from basic developmental processes to family and sociocultural contexts,…