A group of 37 8-year-old children who had scored below the 20th percentile on a national reading test were offered intensive reading instruction in groups of four during Grade 3 in two periods (10 and 5 weeks). The intervention was delivered by six teachers who received training in a comprehensive reading intervention programme called…

The ability to derive the meanings of words from supportive story contexts was studied in 45 7- to 8-year-olds. Children read short stories each containing a different novel word and defined the word at the end of each story. There were three intervention sessions. One group was asked to justify their definition and subsequently received feedback…

Word-level reading and phonological processing measures were administered in English and Chinese to adult ESL students whose first language (L1) was Mandarin and whose second language (L2) was English. Instructors also identified students who may be at risk for L2 reading difficulties based on specific identification criteria. L2 phonological…

In a series of three experiments, we examined how sentential and discourse contexts were used by adults who are learning to read compared with skilled adult readers. In Experiment 1, participants read sentence contexts that were either congruent, incongruent or neutral with respect to a target word they had to name. Both skilled and less skilled…

An investigation was conducted into the visual and auditory temporal processing profiles of two groups of 4- to 6-year-old children: "pre-alphabetic" children, who showed no alphabetic ability (failing to read any non-words in a test), and those who demonstrated some alphabetic ability. This "alphabetic" group showed higher scores in reading and…

Two groups of undergraduate students, matched for reading skill but differing in spelling ability, participated in three experiments with the aim of exploring the causes of differences in spelling skill in this population. In the first experiment participants were presented with a range of tasks to investigate the possibility that the poor…

This study aimed to develop a set of quantitative instruments to investigate Hong Kong Chinese language teachers' orientation to reading instruction, their instructional practices and the relation between these two constructs under the implementation of the new curriculum. A total of 493 Chinese language teachers from 170 secondary schools in Hong…

Recent governments in the United Kingdom have introduced a number of initiatives aimed at improving the literacy levels of children. Policy and practice should be informed by rigorous evidence, and this evidence should be subjected to critical scrutiny. In the present paper the results of a "tertiary" review of systematic reviews in…

Visual stress is the experience of unpleasant visual symptoms when engaged in reading and some other visual tasks. There is currently no objective diagnostic test for this condition, which affects a substantial proportion of the population and which can disrupt development of reading skills. The reliability of subjective reports of symptoms has…

This study explored comprehension monitoring, use of reading strategies and reading comprehension of bilingual students at different levels of perceived proficiency in Italian. The participants were bilingual fifth to eighth-grade elementary school students from four Italian schools in Rijeka, Croatia. Students' reading comprehension was assessed.…

This study examined word identification, phonological recoding efficiency, familiar word reading efficiency, orthographic choice for familiar words and serial naming speed as potential correlates of orthographic learning following silent reading in third-grade children. Children silently read a series of short stories, each containing six…

In this article, we examine how Christianity provides the impetus for local literacy practices in a rural community in Uganda. These Christian literacy practices form a central part of the literacy activities of the community and are manifested in a variety of contexts from public to private, using a wide variety of readily available religious…

Acquisition of orthographic knowledge and phonemic sensitivity are processes that are central to early reading development in several languages. The language-specific characteristics of the alphasyllabaries ( Bright, 1996), however, challenge the constructs of orthographic knowledge and phonemic sensitivity as discussed in the context of…

This article reports on the evaluation of an extensive reading programme in primary schools in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in Africa. The programme involved the delivery of book boxes at Years 4 and 5 to every Malawian primary school. Summative evaluation was achieved through baseline and project-end testing, with observations and…

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…