Given that teacher professional development is a part of teachers' professional lives and given that billions of dollars have been invested in teacher professional development, this dissertation advocates for research that studies teacher learning and the conditions under which they learn, as an equally important component of studying the impact…

Reading skills are the key building blocks of a child's formal education. Yet, the national statistics on literacy attainment are profoundly distressing: two out of three American fourth graders are reading below grade level and almost one third of children nationwide lack even basic reading skills. This study reports on an evaluation of the…

The purpose of this phenomenological bound case study was to explore the effect of acquiring sight words on reading fluency and comprehension skills for early literacy learners during a summer reading camp at one elementary campus in south Texas. Study findings indicated that through prescribed learning experiences with sight words that included…

Reading instruction has historically been deemphasized for students in special education, and the limited research on this topic reveals that sight word vocabulary is most commonly taught in special education classrooms (Browder, Wakeman, Spooner, Ahlgrim-Delzell, Algozzine, 2006). However, successful reading instruction must target the five…

As close reading assessment becomes ubiquitous in secondary education, so too does our interest in new literacies. Though online reading may seem to be at cross purposes with "on paper" close reading, this author suggests how the two may successfully intersect. The close reading initiative at Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School in…

When teachers engage student confidence in discerning visual metaphor and when they make students aware of their skills, they can teach them how to transfer the reading of the visual to the reading of text. This article details some activities for facilitating that transfer. Engaging and challenging visual activities can lead to an enhanced…

Common Core English Language Arts Standards and changing technologies have shifted the ways students and teachers select and read text. Reasons for the lack of digital literacy implementation in instruction are due to the large amount of choices available without sufficient background information on how to critically evaluate literacy…

The book showcases collaborative intercultural research into English language teaching and English language teacher education across Australasia covering a broad range of topics from English education policies, curricular reform and practices, teacher professional development, and teacher and student identities. Together, the selected studies…

This randomized controlled trial focused on 59 struggling readers in the third and fourth grades (30 female, 29 male) and examined the efficacy of an intervention aimed at increasing students' multisyllabic word reading (MWR). The study also explored the relative effects of an embedded motivational beliefs (MB) training component. Struggling…

Several early literacy programmes have documented their effectiveness in enhancing children's early literacy and language development. Despite recent interest in implementing evidence-based programmes, only a few studies have set out to capture the implementation process of early literacy programmes as seen from the programme users' perspectives.…

This study examined whether training English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in a self-regulated learning (SRL) model could help them develop the ability to self-regulate their reading in English and whether their proficiency level could moderate the efficacy of self-regulation training. Two experimental groups received instruction in…

In this study, we examined the spelling performance of 430 kindergartners, which included a high-risk sample, to determine the relations between end-of-kindergarten reading and spelling in a high-quality language arts setting. We described, analyzed, and compared spelling outcomes, including spelling errors, between good and poor readers. The…

This article describes the experiences of some of the many families of the deaf and hard of hearing children who come to Shared Reading Saturdays at Northern Essex Community College (NECC) in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The program, which includes monthly gatherings and is coordinated by the NECC's Gallaudet University Regional Center, features deaf…

This article reports findings on a case study of Ellie as she participates in a language arts curriculum that incorporates multimodal literacy practices--including photography, drama, and art--to teach reading and writing. Our study was informed by the theoretical framework of multimodal social semiotics, which provides insight into how…

The current study investigated the effect of implementing animation films on developing reading comprehension texts among EFL learners of a language institute in Kerman. For this purpose, two groups of pre-intermediate EFL learners were chosen (30 participants in each group). After three months of instruction, twice a week, 2story books named the…