This article engages with recent policy on reading comprehension. It argues that the construct of inference has been treated as a single entity despite research and literature to the contrary, and this is perpetuated in the National Curriculum for 2014. It explores the limitations of conceptualising inference as a unitary construct and…

Guided reading is widely perceived to be tricky in English primary schools; prior research has found difficulties with teacher interpretation and implementation. The study reported here suggests that to understand the problems associated with it we should also take into account pupils' perspectives on their guided reading lessons. In this…

Research on implementing reading strategy instruction has primarily focused on teachers' verbal communication with limited attention to other semiotic resources such as gesture and artefacts. In this paper, we construct a "telling case" on the basis of how one primary teacher from the United States used speech, gesture and artefacts…

This study considers reading comprehension as a dialogic transaction of making meaning from text. The concept of text and reading is taken to include the visual and multimodal as well as written forms. Case studies of children discussing texts are analysed to explore how children engage in inter-mental and intra-mental processes of reading,…

Multimedia literacy practices in the homes of young children are changing rapidly, but the use of them in the early years of education is moving slowly. This research was aimed to find out what teachers of 5-year-olds, in their first 6?months of compulsory schooling, think about the children's literacy practices at home, including the…

In recent years, literacy educators have increasingly recognised the importance of addressing a broader range of texts in the classroom. This article raises some critical concerns about a particular approach to this issue that has been widely promoted in recent years-- the concept of "multimodality". Multimodality theory offers a broadly…

After briefly reviewing how reading is conceptualised in the "Progress in International Reading Literacy Study" and the English National Curriculum, this article examines two unofficial reading activities in a class of 10-11-year-olds' to see how far these activities match up with the official definitions of reading, or whether they…

This qualitative case study explored the relationship between comprehension strategies and graphic novels in one Grade 4 classroom, utilising children as informants. The primary research questions related to children's applications of metacognitive reading comprehension strategies as well as the potential for graphic novels to support the…

Teachers of reading in secondary schools know how important it is for low-attaining readers to read whole narratives but time to do this in a crowded curriculum is limited and progress is more easily measured through reading smaller parts of texts. This paper reports on a longitudinal critical action research project in which three English…

The novel, it has generally been assumed, was from its very beginnings a literary form designed to be read by solitary, silent individuals. One consequence of this assumption is that the class novel, read amid all the noise and sociality of the classroom, tends to be treated as a preparation for more authentic, private reading, or even as a poor…

Teachers are influential in motivating and improving attitudes towards reading. This article reports on an investigation of eight teachers of 10- to 12-year-old students from five New Zealand schools and the strategies they used to improve attitudes to reading. Each school had been identified as implementing effective reading programmes by a panel…

A large-scale randomised-controlled trial of reading tutoring in 80 schools in Scotland used the Paired Reading (PR) technique. On long-term evaluation, cross-age PR was significantly better than regular teaching, but same-age was not. On short-term evaluation, PR pupils did significantly better than control pupils in both years, and cross-age and…

This is a follow-up study regarding one of the early readers whose metacognitive reading strategies were explored in my 1991 qualitative case study research, published in "Reading", 29 (2), 30-33. Unique factors in the original study involve the inclusion of young children as informants related to self, task and text. Six-year-old "Jan" is now…

Despite a push to develop high levels of active engagement in learning by helping students reflect, refine and extend their ideas through effective questioning strategies, evidence suggests that teacher-dominated interaction patterns permeate classroom instruction. This Initiate, Respond and Evaluate process leads students to maintain a passive…

In 2006-2007 a non-profit reading institute initiated a reading reform programme in the United States in which demonstration classrooms were established in 13 of the lowest performing schools in Mississippi, a state recognised for its high rate of poverty and low academic achievement. This qualitative study describes the experiences of 12 highly…