Two measures of syntactic complexity, clauses per T-unit and words per clause, were used to examine differences among four genres of text--narrative, descriptive, compare/contrast, and persuasive--written by the same two cohorts (83 students in grades three and five and 96 students in grades five and seven) on two occasions 2 years apart as part…

As a predominant discourse of the early twenty-first century, the new capitalism (and its companion cultural system, neoliberalism) privilege flexibility, risk, emotional intelligence, and the enterprising self. New capitalist discourses exert powerful and pervasive effects across all dimensions of human experience and activity from personal…

As students make the transition from learning to read to reading to learn, they find themselves increasingly isolated (Fang 2008; Guthrie and Davis 2003). Gone are the picture books and read alouds of their elementary years; instead, they are faced with dense nonfiction texts and the direction to read and learn the facts. In addition, many science…

Publishing graded readers is big business, but there is evidence that the texts themselves are not being read in sufficient quantity to improve language proficiency. This article reports on a study of graded readers, focusing on interviews with some major publishers of graded readers, to investigate their production rationales. The findings…

This study uses data from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy to identify relationships between parents' demographic/socioeconomic backgrounds and their self-reported frequencies of engaging in early childhood education activities. It also examines race/ethnicity-related disparities in the frequency of reading to children and using…

Reading teachers, novice or experienced, face the hard task of having to teach students how to read by moving beyond the mere "surface level" of reading (finding meanings in the text) into a more critical perspective (assigning meaning to what is being read). Many teachers struggle in trying to reconcile these two perspectives as they…

Informational text presents many obstacles to comprehension for striving readers. Although teachers use many evidence-based practices to support instruction with this type of text, in some situations, readers may be able to increase their comprehension by rereading. Teachers can help students recognize situations in which rereading is helpful.…

The basic features of digital reading devices (such as the Amazon Kindle) are described in this article. The author also considers how such devices can advance e-book readership among primary students by offering new avenues for accessing and interacting with a wide array of texts. Rooted in the transactional theory of reader response and a new…

The study examined the effects of textual prompt fading on the acquisition of intraverbals in 3 individuals with developmental disabilities. An alternating treatments design was used to assess the two independent variables. The first independent variable was transfer of stimulus control without component skill fluency. The second independent…

In this article, the author shares her experience during the final semester of Year 11 Theatre Studies when she performed a monologue about Hermione from "The Winter's Tale". This experience was extremely significant to her because it nearly made her lose faith in one of the most important parts of her life, drama. She believes this…

Sight-word instruction is the most common method of reading instruction for students with Moderate Intellectual Disabilities reported in the research literature. The purpose of this study was to go beyond instruction of single word units to instruction of multiple-word phrases. This study demonstrated the instruction of reading and comprehending…

Readers apply their own standards of coherence while reading text. Readers with a low standard of coherence are thought to find a sparse and incomplete representation more coherent than readers who employ a higher standard. This article reports 3 experiments that examined standards of coherence imposed by skilled and less-skilled readers by having…

The computer marking of short-answer free-text responses of around a sentence in length has been found to be at least as good as that of six human markers. The marking accuracy of three separate computerised systems has been compared, one system (Intelligent Assessment Technologies FreeText Author) is based on computational linguistics whilst two…

This report describes an individualized literacy intervention program that was developed for a fifth grade boy who struggled with reading. Based upon informal assessment and evaluation procedures, the following literacy strategies were taught within a one-to-one instructional setting: Repeated Readings, Personal Vocabulary Journal, Phonemic…

This qualitative, action research study was guided by two primary research questions. First, how do students negotiate aesthetic, efferent, and critical stances when reading a novel set in Afghanistan? Second, how do aesthetic and efferent stances contribute to or hinder the adoption of a critical stance? A large body of research exists that…