A comparison was made of 10-year-old boys and girls who had learnt to read by analytic or synthetic phonics methods as part of their early literacy programmes. The boys taught by the synthetic phonics method had better word reading than the girls in their classes, and their spelling and reading comprehension was as good. In contrast, with analytic…

The clear message in the common core literacy standards is that students need to do less narrative reading and more informational reading. But narrative, the author contends, is the deep structure of all good writing. Teachers need to show students how narrative works in their reading, be it fiction or nonfiction. Students should understand that a…

Research on comprehension of written text and reading processes suggests a greater use of reading processes is associated with higher scores on comprehension measures of those same texts. Although researchers have suggested that the graphics in text convey important meaning, little research exists on the relationship between children's processes…

This article uses a review of research to consider a fundamental aspect of reading instruction that has been marginalized in policies and practices over the last decade: the development of silent reading habits that involve strong comprehension and optimal reading rates. The review of research attends to typical development and performances of…

Reading comprehension is a complex skill that places significant demands on students, beginning with elementary school and continuing through the secondary grades. In this article, we provide an overview of possible factors associated with problems in reading comprehension among secondary students with learning disabilities. Discussion underscores…

Two experiments explored concept map construction as a useful intervention to improve metacomprehension accuracy among 7th grade students. In the first experiment, metacomprehension was marginally better for a concept mapping group than for a rereading group. In the second experiment, metacomprehension accuracy was significantly greater for a…

The National Reading Panel identified fluency as one of the five essential components of reading. Fluency serves as a bridge between word recognition and comprehension. Individuals who are able to read effortlessly and accurately have more capacity to attend to the meaning and, as a result, better understand what they read. The purpose of this…

The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of different types of questioning interventions on students' reading comprehension. Fourth-grade students (n = 246) were identified as struggling, average, or good readers and assigned randomly within school to one of three questioning interventions: two inferential conditions (Causal or…

Conceptualizations of developmental trends are driven by the particular method used to analyze the period of change of interest. Various techniques exist to analyze developmental data, including individual growth curve analysis in observed and latent frameworks, cross-lagged regression to assess interrelations among variables, and multilevel…

Research in sub-Saharan Africa investigating the effect of mother tongue (MT) literacy instruction at medium scale is limited. A randomized controlled trial of MT literacy instruction was implemented in 2013 and 2014 as part of the Primary Math and Reading (PRIMR) Initiative in Kenya. We compare the effect of two treatment groups--the base PRIMR…

This study investigated the effect of reading strategies training on the students' literal and inferential reading comprehension. The training involved three concrete strategies: predicting, text mapping, and summarizing. To achieve the purpose of this study, a quasi experimental design was selected with the experimental group being given reading…

Phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), letter knowledge, and oral language are all significant predictors of successful literacy acquisition in several languages. However, their relative importance is less clear and depends on language characteristics, the specific aspect of literacy assessed, and the phase of literacy…

The association made between the meaning, spelling, and pronunciation of a word has been shown to help children remember the meanings of words. The present study addressed whether the presence of a target word in Braille during instruction facilitated vocabulary learning more efficiently than an auditory-only instructional condition. The authors…

This study aims to examine the relationship between reading comprehension and lexical and grammatical knowledge among English as a foreign language students by using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). There were 825 test takers administered both a second-language reading test and a set of psychometrically validated grammar and vocabulary tests.…

The merits of decentralized small groups has been questioned in literature and by practicing teachers; thus this study shows the academic and identity work children do as they attempt to make meaning in these spaces. This study explores the affordances and drawbacks of decentralized small group discussion contexts in a multiage (3rd/4th) grade…