The purpose of this article is to highlight the importance of providing reading interventions that are differentiated and aligned with an individual student's most foundational reading skill need. The authors present profiles of different readers and suggest three principal areas for support: decoding words, reading at an appropriate rate, and…

An essential element in teaching children to effectively comprehend text is the use of teacher-led think alouds. This article presents a three-step model to improve the quality and quantity of think alouds in K-6 classrooms. The article follows elementary teachers who planned, implemented, transcribed, and reflected upon think aloud lessons to…

This paper addresses a perennial question of the religious studies and, indeed, of most liberal arts classrooms: How do I get my students to read texts thoroughly and with understanding? After briefly reviewing the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) data, I argue that what teachers desire is not just basic literacy, but fluency, which is…

Few dictionary studies have examined the effectiveness of freely available online dictionaries (FAOD) offered by search engine companies. This experimental study examines the effectiveness of one FAOD, Naver.com, as an aid to vocabulary acquisition for a group of 87 intermediate-level Korean university students aged 19 to 28 (mean 21.9). The VKS…

We report results of 2 studies examining the relation between decoding and reading comprehension. Based on our analysis of prominent reading theories such as the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) and the Self-Teaching Hypothesis (Share, 1995), we propose the Decoding…

Printed texts have long been used as the prime medium of learning to read and reading to learn. However, the ubiquity of technology has emerged digital texts, and the accelerating influx of digital texts requires new comprehension skills and strategies. This article reviews and synthesizes current ideas and research findings on digital reading in…

Research in literature reports the importance of L2 vocabulary and syntactic knowledge on the learners' reading comprehension. In this regard, the current study investigated the role of vocabulary knowledge that is disunited into depth and breadth dimensions and syntactic knowledge in the reading comprehension scores of an advanced cohort of…

This dissertation chronicled a multifaceted study utilizing the Historical, Philosophical, Societal and a Takeaway (HPST) Framework, an organizational tool used for document analysis. Utilizing a case study format, this research unpacked how a charter school teacher used HPST within her own ninth grade Advanced Placement World History class. As a…

Background: Students with intellectual disabilities (IDs) have various learning difficulties and are at risk for school failure. Large inter-individual differences are described for reading, but it is unclear how these vary as a function of grade. The aim of this study was to examine various reading fluency, accuracy and comprehension parameters…

This study examined the impact of explicit comprehension strategy instruction supported by guided reading and partner reading on at-risk students' strategy knowledge and reading comprehension. Participants were 47 first graders (25 in the treatment group; 22 in the control group) and 44 second graders (19 in the treatment group; 25 in the control…

Learning to compose texts adequate for different purposes is crucial for becoming literate. We examined developmental changes in the rhetorical structure of written texts produced by Spanish children throughout the early years of elementary school in the light of descriptive writing purposes. Children had also performed tasks to test…

Students' ability to comprehend what they read is greatly influenced by what they already know and have experienced. For this reason, teachers work to activate students' background knowledge prior to reading. Regrettably, the pedagogical techniques available to teachers for activating students' knowledge are quite limited. Further, those available…

Reading comprehension assessments often include multiple-choice (MC) questions, but some researchers doubt their validity in measuring comprehension. Consequently, new assessments may include more short-answer (SA) questions. The current study contributes to the research comparing MC and SA questions by evaluating the effects of anticipated…

The 2I/E model is an extension of Marsh's (1986) classical internal/external frame of reference (I/E) model. Whereas the classical I/E model describes the formation of academic self-concept by the joint operation of social (external) and dimensional (internal) comparisons, the 2I/E model integrates temporal comparisons as an additional internal…

Over the years, persistently low achievement levels have led scholars to question whether reading skill development is different for deaf readers. Research findings suggest that in order for deaf students to become proficient readers, they must master the same fundamental abilities that are well established for hearing learners, regardless of the…