Academic language is frequently assumed to be especially challenging for students from families of low socioeconomic status (SES) and even more so for language-minority students. Due to their often especially disadvantaged position regarding socioeconomic background and exposure to the language of instruction, language minority students are…

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…

Executive functioning (EF) refers to a set of higher order, core cognitive processes that facilitate planning, problem solving, and the initiation and maintenance of goal-directed behavior. Although recent research has established the importance of EF for word reading development in early childhood, few studies have investigated the role of EF in…

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…

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,…

The Carnegie Corporation of New York is associated with the very foundations of literacy going back to the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie himself and of the Corporation in its early years. Andrew Carnegie's legacy includes over 2,500 free public libraries that he saw as a link "bridging ignorance and education." In fact, Carnegie, the man,…

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…

This study examined the extent that motivational processes facilitate the comprehension of texts and the extent of culture's role in children's motivational processes of text comprehension. Relationships between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the amount of reading, past reading achievement, and text comprehension were examined by utilizing…