Adults with low vision who seek clinical low vision services need to be able to read (that is, to interpret or understand words, numbers, and symbols in print meaningfully). Reading difficulties that adults encounter during low vision therapy may be directly connected to a visual impairment or may be related to other reading problems, such as…

Theories about reading have neglected basic differences in the developmental trajectories of skills related to reading. This essay proposes that some reading skills, such as learning the letters of the alphabet, are constrained to small sets of knowledge that are mastered in relatively brief periods of development. In contrast, other skills, such…

This is an on-going, annual study chronicling which topics in literacy education are "hot" (receiving current and positive attention) and which are "not hot" (receiving less or negative attention), according to a survey of literacy leaders. Details about how the survey was constructed and administered are included, as well as some information…

In the current climate of accountability and research-based practices in reading instruction, professional development is often identified as one of the key elements needed to change the trajectory of progress for struggling readers and to ensure their ongoing success. Research on teacher quality and its impact on student achievement seems to…

Since the mid 1990s, reading instruction has changed and so has the School Development Program's (SDP) Essentials of Literacy (EOL) process. Beginning as a teaching suggestion at one New Haven, Connecticut school, Lincoln Bassett, EOL became a pilot project at Davis Street School in New Haven for the 1996-1997 school year and continues to be an…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between different text-leveling systems and reading accuracy and fluency in second-grade students with and without decoding difficulties. Two-hundred-forty-eight second-grade students, 44 identified as low achieving (LA) and 204 identified as average achieving (AA) in decoding skill,…

In this paper Graham Frater finds early signs of a revival of explicit instruction in English grammar to pupils of compulsory school age in England; this is accompanied by an expectation that such teaching might play an important part in closing the "writing gap." He suggests that, strengthened by the National Literacy Strategy, this early…

The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate the developmental antecedents of reading performance and its subcomponents from the beginning of the first year to the end of the second year of primary school. One-hundred-and-fourteen seven-year-old Finnish-speaking children were tested on reading-related skills during their first week of…

Background: This study evaluated the effectiveness of an intervention for reading-delayed children in Year-1 classes. Methods: A sample (N = 77) of children drawn from 14 schools representing those with the weakest reading skills were randomly allocated to one of two groups. A 20-week intervention group received the intervention for two…

In this article, the authors discuss the benefits of using multi-voiced journals as a teaching strategy in reading instruction. Multi-voiced journals, an adaptation of dual-voiced journals, encourage responses to reading in varied, cultured voices of characters. It is similar to reading journals in that they prod students to connect to the lives…

Weekends, summers, and holidays are better spent reading and participating in fun activities with one's child. Time at home can be spent doing something creative by creating thematic book bags that children and parents can check out of the class. In this way, children are able to see their parents making reading and school a priority, while…

Reading is fundamental to learning from textbooks and other written materials in all content areas. Unfortunately, most children are brought up on a diet of narrative literature, but by the time they get to third grade, their textbooks are mainly informational (expository) instead of narrative, and sentence structures evolve from simple to…

The authors, both of whom are outside the network of scholars and practitioners typically associated with Reading Recovery, describe the instructional and teacher professional development components of the program and review related research. They then explore the theory and instructional assumptions on which RR is based, positing that both have…

As part of a larger study on developing children's reading fluency in the classroom, a program was introduced to help parents understand the importance of fluency and participate in fluency-related activities with children at home. The Family Fluency Program included activities similar to those that the children were doing in school, with some…

Reading First's $1 billion-a-year investment in improving reading instruction seemed to be the kind of incentive that would push publishers to develop a new generation of products and approaches to match the research base the No Child Left Behind Act requires. But the money for instructional materials has not spread much beyond the handful of big…