The National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Common Core State Standards require students, starting in elementary school, to read an increasing amount of informational text (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). Students with learning disabilities, however, typically struggle with expository text and require even more direct instruction…

Having used sustained silent reading (SSR) to motivate reluctant readers in secondary level classes, Steve Gardiner uses the writing equivalent of SSR with secondary students who he wants to motivate and strengthen as authors. He describes the masterpiece assignment he devised and uses with students. Students work all school year on an extended…

A quarter century ago, Hanson (1989) asked, "Is reading different for deaf individuals?" (p. 85). Appealing to evidence available at the time, she argued that skilled deaf readers, like their hearing counterparts, relied on their knowledge of English structure, including phonological information. This perspective on the role phonology…

Reading disability in children with dyslexia has been proposed to reflect impairment in auditory timing perception. We investigated one aspect of timing perception--"temporal grouping"--as present in prosodic phrase boundaries of natural speech, in age-matched groups of children, ages 6-8 years, with and without dyslexia. Prosodic phrase…

A single case study design was employed to describe the nature of one teacher's verbal scaffolding used during differentiated reading instruction in a kindergarten classroom. The teacher participant was selected from a group of exemplary teachers nominated from two school districts in southwestern Pennsylvania. Multiple sources of data, including…

Wordless picturebooks may be better defined by what they do contain--visually rendered narratives--rather than what they do not contain. This column challenges traditional ways of looking at wordless picturebooks and offers a few approaches for integrating wordless picturebooks into a wider range of classrooms, preschool through middle school.

Most action researchers agree that action research consists of cycles of planning, acting, reflecting, and taking further action. However, in action research literature, there is something missing. The nature of reflection in the action research process, including its relationship with the tensions that arise while discussing purposes, processes,…

For most classroom teachers, recognizing when students are engaged in literacy activities--and perhaps more glaringly, when they are not--is a process that is key to evaluating the potential success of the instruction being offered. Students who are engaged have their eyes on what they are doing, are ardently attending to the teacher's read aloud…

Throughout its history, the ecology of the picturebook has been impacted by various social and cultural changes. Postmodernism is one perspective, among other conceptual and theoretical frameworks, that has been proposed to explain some of the fundamental changes evident in many contemporary picturebooks. A review of the literature (Pantaleo &…

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the consistency of five single-case outcome indicators, used to assess response-to-intervention data from a pilot Tier 2 reading intervention that was implemented at an elementary school. Using convergent evidence scaling, the indicators were converted onto a common interpretive scale for each case…

The recent call for secondary reading instruction to move away from a focus on generic literacy strategies to discipline-specific language and literacy practices presents new challenges for secondary teacher preparation. This column identifies some of the roles literacy teacher educators can play in helping address these challenges.

This study analyzed the effectiveness of instructional time on rhythm-reading learning and retention. Second-grade students (N = 128) received either five-minutes or ten-minutes of rhythm-reading instruction using techniques from Feierabend's (2001) "Conversational Solfege" and practice during regularly scheduled weekly music class.…

We want all children to love reading, and Which Book and Why demonstrates how effective guided reading for children in Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1 can help teachers make this happen. Balancing theory and practice, this book explores how schools and teachers can implement guided reading more confidently and more effectively. Which Book and Why…

Belief(s) and attitude(s) about education, moreover reading, can shape the way in which we respond to pressures to initiate instructional changes in schools and society. Recently, an enormous reform effort, known as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is underway in the nation. The implementation plays a critical role in how the CCSS will be…

The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of a tablet computer-aided intervention program for improving reading fluency. It also investigates the opinions of students and parents about this intervention by using skill- and performance-based techniques, which have been investigated qualitatively. Three students with a learning…