The primary aim of this study was to explore the relationship between teachers' instruction and students' vocabulary and comprehension in grades 3-5. The secondary aim of this study was to investigate whether this relationship differed for English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual students. To meet these aims, we observed and…

This study examined the role of reading disability (RD) risk and environmental protective factors in reading fluency in grade 4. The sample consisted of 538 Finnish-speaking students. Kindergarten measures included the students' risk for RD based on poor achievement in phonological awareness and letter knowledge as well as information on the…

The purpose of this study is to contribute to efforts to improve methods for gathering and analyzing data from classroom observations in early literacy. The methodological approach addresses current problems of reliability and validity of classroom observations by taking into account differences in teachers' uses of instructional actions…

Reading comprehension is a highly demanding task that involves the simultaneous process of extracting and constructing meaning in which working memory's executive processes play a crucial role. In this article, a training program on working memory's executive processes to improve reading comprehension is presented and empirically tested in two…

This randomized control trial examined the efficacy of a multitiered supplemental tutoring program within a first-grade responsiveness-to-intervention prevention model. Struggling first-grade readers (n = 649) were screened and progress monitored at the start of the school year. Those identified as unresponsive to general education Tier 1 (n =…

This article examines the reading of leveled books and the assessment of students' reading levels in a public school classroom. The purpose of the research study was to examine how these processes of assessment, which often go unnoticed, shaped the ways reading and readers were defined. The research was located in a third grade, public school…

There is accumulating correlational evidence that the effect of specific types of reading instruction depends on children's initial language and literacy skills, called child characteristics x instruction (CxI) interactions. There is, however, no experimental evidence beyond first grade. This randomized control study examined whether CxI…

This case study of reading activity in third-grade bilingual classrooms at a state-sanctioned "successful" school examines the influences of the California accountability framework--Proposition 227, No Child Left Behind, and the federal Reading First program--on shifting beliefs and practices around what "counts" as reading. The researcher…

An experiment examined whether metalinguistic awareness involving the detection of semantic ambiguity can be taught, and whether this instruction improves students' reading comprehension. Lower SES third graders from a variety of cultural backgrounds (M = 8 yr. 7 mo., N = 46) were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Those receiving…

Core reading programs provide the curriculum and guide the instruction for many classroom teachers. The purpose of this study was to conduct a curriculum analysis of comprehension instruction in the five most widely used core reading programs. The recommended comprehension instruction in grades 3, 4, and 5 was examined to answer four questions:…

When skilled readers search for a target letter while reading for comprehension, they miss the target letter more often when it is embedded in high-frequency function words than in less frequent content words. The magnitude of this "missing-letter-effect" (MLE) was investigated among 180 first- to fifth-grade students as a function of their…

The aim of this five-year longitudinal study was to examine whether 13 Greek precocious readers' performance on a variety of reading, spelling, and phonological-awareness tasks from kindergarten through the fourth grade was different from that of 12 Greek nonprecocious readers and, if there were differences between the two groups' performances,…

To address the issue of declining reading achievement in the school where she worked, the author analyzed reading records and written work of primary students attending several district elementary schools over the course of one school year. From that analysis, it appeared that an obstacle to reading success for many children in the third grade was…

The goals of this study were to (a) develop an empirically based model regarding the development of fluent and automatic reading in the early elementary school years and (b) determine whether fluent text-reading skills provided benefits for reading comprehension beyond those accounted for by fluent word decoding. First-, second-, and third-grade…

This is a compilation of reports on international literacy research. The report includes 3 separate reports on France, United Kingdom and Brazil. In the first report, research correspondent Jacques Fijalkow presents research into variations of reading motivation related to students' socioeconomic status (SES), age, and gender. Three of these…