Chinese written language is different from alphabetic written languages in many respects, and for this reason, interest in the nature of the cognitive processes underlying Chinese reading has flourished over recent years. A number of researchers have used eye movement methodology as a measure of on-line processing to understand more about…

This article uses the analytic lens of power relations and models of power to examine how the participation of two students in an urban US eighth-grade English language arts class was symbolically and literally deleted. The researcher asks why do some students fail despite being placed in a technologically rich educational environment that…

Our goal with this special issue was to bring together a range of research on learning to read in more than one language. In this introduction, we provide an overview of clear diversity across the language pairings, learning contexts and reading-related skills examined. We also highlight some particularly noteworthy and often intriguing findings…

Given that many young children now enter their early years in education as competent and frequent users of digital technology, this paper examines how this experience influences children's perceptions of reading. Drawing from research conducted with 12 young children (aged 3-6) this paper reports on the ways in which these children were…

This paper describes a small-scale study that examined the ways four elementary teachers in the United States scaffolded the literacy of students differently through interruptions. One thousand four hundred and ninety-eight interruptions were identified and coded in the study. Findings show that teachers' interruption patterns frequently…

Recent years have brought about rapid advances in our understanding of reading and how it develops, particularly in relation to the importance of alphabetic coding skills. However, much less has been known about the transition from alphabetic decoding to the rapid and automatic orthographic recognition of words, which is the hallmark of skilled…

Reading is a multi-sensory activity, entailing perceptual, cognitive and motor interactions with whatever is being read. With digital technology, reading manifests itself as being extensively multi-sensory--both in more explicit and more complex ways than ever before. In different ways from traditional reading technologies such as the codex,…

This paper discusses an attempt to establish community literacy procedures in an Eastern Cape community school. The school hosts the Additive Bilingual Education (ABLE) project, a cooperation between UK and South African universities and the school trust. The community literacy strand of the project encourages family members to contribute oral…

Prereading and early reading skills of preschool twin children in Australia, Scandinavia and the United States were explored in a genetically sensitive design (max. N=627 preschool pairs and 422 kindergarten pairs). Analyses indicated a strong genetic influence on preschool phonological awareness, rapid naming and verbal memory. Print awareness,…

We report preliminary behaviour genetic analyses of reading and listening comprehension from The Colorado Learning Disabilities Research Center. Although the twin sample with these new measures is still of limited size, we find substantial, and significant, genetic influences on individual differences in both reading and listening comprehension.…

The Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg and Patterson (1996) connectionist model of reading was evaluated at two points early in its training against reading data collected from British children on two occasions during their first year of literacy instruction. First, the network's non-word reading was poor relative to word reading when compared with the…

Study-abroad students, products of their own particular academic literacy culture, face the challenge of rapidly integrating into a foreign academic literacy community. This study identifies possible culturally dependent sources of literacy problems in Law and Economics students in Great Britain, France and Spain. Nearly 600 potential European…

The introduction of text conventions, such as word separation, the separation of letter and background and the lower-case letter are appraised with respect to their contribution to literacy instruction. The change in the visual appearance of the graphic word over time led to the assignment of secondary status to spelling and low appreciation of…

Describes one aspect of a year-long study of primary level teacher's and children's use of the language arts component of SuccessMaker, an Integrated Learning System (ILS). Documents areas where the curricula embedded in the ILS were congruent with teacher's normal curricula and pedagogical practices. Raises issues about the appropriate…

Presents a discussion paper reflecting on the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) after one year of operation. Argues that once the NLS becomes established it will be necessary for all teachers to engage with the research literature so that they teach from a position of professional understanding of the processes involved in reading and writing…