Students in academic contexts are expected to engage with large amounts of reading and they frequently meet unknown words and phrases in those reading materials. Previous research has shown that second and foreign language learners can acquire some of the unknown vocabulary that they encounter during reading. However, these previous findings were…

The following semi-autobiographical essay tells a cautionary tale about the entrenched Anglocentrism, Eurocentrism, and Alphabetism in reading and reading disabilities (dyslexia) research. Having been born, raised, and educated in an entirely monolingual English-speaking environment, I later migrated to a country where non-European languages…

Text-to-speech and related read-aloud tools are being widely implemented in an attempt to assist students' reading comprehension skills. Read-aloud software, including text-to-speech, is used to translate written text into spoken text, enabling one to listen to written text while reading along. It is not clear how effective text-to-speech is at…

Learning to read is an expectation rather than an exception in society today. Despite this, some children experience reading difficulties. The purpose of this article is to review recent and seminal research on reading difficulties through the lenses of three perspectives: cognitive, social and cultural and interactive. The three perspectives are…

This study investigated the relationships among vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, reading comprehension, and reading rate among college-aged students. While the relationships of some of these variables have been explored in previous research, the current study's focus on the role of vocabulary depth on the literacy measures within a sample of…

This qualitative case study examined the contribution a year-long professional development in the science of reading had on 10 first-grade teachers' knowledge of how reading develops and their instructional practices. Data for this research study was collected through a longitudinal interview process, from pre- and post-knowledge inventory…

This article is a response to claims made by proponents of "science of reading" and "structured literacy" reading instruction approaches, in regard to their effectiveness with emergent bilingual students. The author argues that the strong knowledge base generated from studies examining the dynamic literacy practices of emergent…

We are pleased to contribute to this inaugural issue of The Reading League Journal. The journal's goal is to share information about linking reading science to educational practice. The need is great: literacy levels in the US are shockingly low; a very large percentage of children and adults have only basic reading skills, as indicated by every…

Quantifying the decoding difficulty (i.e., 'decodability') of text is important for accurately matching young readers to appropriate text and scaffolding reading development. Since no easily accessible, quantitative, word-level metric of decodability exists, we developed a decoding measure (DM) that can be calculated via a web-based scoring…

The research problems of this study are the difficulties in the explanation of the phenomenon of reading in its accelerated transformations by quantitative sociological methods, because of failure to comply with a number of factors: first, the social aspects of the purchase, consumption and possession of reading materials have not yet been…

This article reviews Margaret Meek Spencer's body of work in relation to the various policies that she critiqued from the Bullock Report in 1974 to the National Literacy Strategy in 2004. She analysed increasingly conservative moves to promote a dominant, elitist version of school literacy. A Critical Realist perspective aligns with Margaret Meek…

According to the RAND model framework, reading comprehension test performance is influenced by readers' reading skills or reader characteristics, test properties, and their interactions. However, little empirical research has systematically compared the impacts of reader characteristics, test properties, and reader-test interactions across…

Little review research has been conducted to describe the interaction and inter-relationships among components of reading development facilitated through mobile assisted language learning (MALL). The language learners, mediation via mobile devices, learning context, learning material and tasks, and learning outcomes need to be carefully examined…

Well-established theoretical models and a body of empirical research elucidate the critical role of content knowledge in comprehending texts. However, the potential of supporting knowledge in service of enhancing linguistic and reading comprehension has been a relatively neglected topic in the science of reading. In this article, we explicate why…

This paper explores self-plagiarism in three different articles that reported results of the same research project on reading in a foreign language. This article follows the qualitative research method and an exploratory case study was used. Results support that both inadequate paraphrasing and adequate paraphrasing were given. Regarding…