Reading the implicit invitation in new literacies scholarship to reimagine pedagogy that leans into the lives of youth, Vasudevan reminds readers how the teacher's body is central to the meaning making of students in literacy classrooms. She extends this notion of embodiment to the work of the literacy coach and reiterates Skinner, Hagood,…

Literacy specialists and coaches are called upon for literacy leadership in schools and often wrestle with the tensions of implementing top-down reforms and making room for teacher- and student-led practices, such as critical literacy. Critical literacy education holds the promise of engaging learners to use literacy practices in ways that matter…

A rapid proliferation of literacy coaching has occurred before adequate research could be undertaken to understand the interaction between coach and teacher. In this analysis of a study undertaken by a college campus-based coach working with teachers in a reading clinic setting, Rodgers applies 2 conceptual frames. The 1st conceptual frame…

Tate applauds Rogers's use of teacher research to illustrate how literacy coaches and teachers can approach an accelerative literacy framework with a critical literacy lens. Citing her own work, as well as the work of other critical literacy educators, Tate reminds readers that teacher research is a careful plan that encompasses the power of…

Literacy coaches are in the business of helping to create some kind of change--change in teaching practice, change in school policy, change in curriculum, or change in teachers and children themselves. But the social interactions necessary for change to happen, such as in-classroom consultations conducted by a literacy coach, are often fraught…

Hall and Campano echo Jones and Rainville's call for compassion and humility in literacy coaching and argue that this is an urgent endeavor in an increasingly top-down educational climate. They offer collective analysis, through teacher inquiry communities and teacher activism, as a potential site of hope for making sense of the larger…

Reilly leans on the metaphor of rhizomes to remind readers that the work of a coach is not linear or hierarchical, but fluid and dynamic. Reilly frames literacy coaches as rhizomatic agents in schools and urges coaches to appreciate resistance and interruptions as critical and necessary for transformative teaching and learning.

This study examined the effectiveness of instruction in a genre-specific reading comprehension strategy, "critical analysis of argumentative text," which was designed to help students to identify, summarize, and critically analyze parts of an argumentative text. The investigators hypothesized that reading instruction would improve the…

For many striving readers in the early grades (Grades K-3), difficulty learning to read manifests at the word level. As a result, such readers are likely to need explicit instruction in the structure of the English language, also referred to as "basic language concepts" (i.e., concepts and skills related to phonology, phonics,…

The purpose of the current mixed-methods study was to investigate a model of professional development and classroom-based early reading intervention implemented by the 1st-grade teaching team in a large urban/suburban school district in the southeastern United States. The intervention provided teachers with ongoing embedded professional…

The Matthew effect, where good readers get increasingly better over time compared to relatively lower-ability readers, is an often cited phenomenon in reading research. However, researchers have not always found empirical evidence supporting a Matthew effect. We used hierarchical growth curve modeling to test for the presence of the Matthew effect…

The instructional hierarchy offers a useful framework for targeting academic interventions. Within this framework, the accuracy with which a student reads might function as an indicator that the student should receive an intervention that focuses either on accuracy or on fluency. The current study examined whether the instructional level for…

Researchers used a kindergarten screening to identify kindergarten students at risk for difficulties in reading (phonological awareness) and writing (fine motor and perceptual skills) prior to beginning the school year. Of the 102 incoming kindergarten students, 54 showed signs of reading or writing difficulties. These 54 children participated in…

Fluent readers can read connected text with accuracy, automaticity, and prosody. Without practice, automaticity cannot develop in reading, and readers must focus their attention on decoding, limiting their ability to simultaneously comprehend. Researchers have traditionally assumed that fluency and comprehension have a unidirectional relationship…

Experts widely consider decoding and fluency as the basis of reading comprehension, while at the same time consistently documenting problems in these areas as major characteristics of students with learning disabilities. However, scholars have developed most of the relevant research within phonologically deep languages, wherein decoding problems…