In many literacy classrooms, students engage in public performances in which they use various texts, movements of their bodies, and verbal interactions. How do we interpret such events? In this article, we critique a representational mode of interpretation and describe an alternate mode. We argue that literacy performances are often about creating…

There is a pervasive silence in literacy research around matters of race, especially with both young people and white people. In this article we illustrate that young white children can and do talk about race, racism, and antiracism within the context of the literacy curriculum. Using a reconstructed framework for analyzing "white talk," one that…

The issues discussed by the contributors to this installment of RRQ's New Directions in Research clearly establish that special education and reading is a particularly timely topic. The field of special education is confronting fundamental changes in how it defines and identifies its constituency; how those changes relate to theory, practice, and…

A Response to Intervention (RTI) model proposes identification of students with reading difficulties on the basis of a series of progressively more intensive instructional interventions over extended periods of time. Learners with serious reading difficulties are those whose difficulties are not resolved by the interventions. Three advantages of…

The authors, both of whom are outside the network of scholars and practitioners typically associated with Reading Recovery, describe the instructional and teacher professional development components of the program and review related research. They then explore the theory and instructional assumptions on which RR is based, positing that both have…

This article reports the findings of a study that examined how middle school struggling readers transact with the reading task demands of his or her respective classroom. The study also examined how each student's teacher transact with the student's reading challenges. The author used a descriptive, case study approach. Findings showed that the…

On December 3, 2004, President Bush signed into law the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA, 2004). The revised law is different from the previous version in at least one important respect. Whereas practitioners were previously encouraged to use IQ-achievement discrepancy to identify children with learning disabilities…

Now that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA, 2004) has been reauthorized, states have the option of discontinuing the use of IQ-achievement discrepancy formulas and using Response to Intervention (RTI) criteria as part of the special education identification process. This change has dramatic implications for…

This article is a compilation of reports on international literacy research. The report includes 3 separate reports on Canada, France and Russia. In the first report, research correspondent Linda M. Phillips, in collaboration with Christian Beaulieu, reports on the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network (CLLRNet). The vision of CLLRNet is…

This article presents the reports from the international research correspondents (IRCs) on the topic of teacher preparation through an informal polling using a questionnaire, consisting of 10 items related to the issue of teacher preparation, in eight countries. The participating IRCs include: (1) Jan Turbill of Australia; (2) Shelley Peterson of…

This is a compilation of two separate reports on international literacy research from France and Argentina. In the reports from France, research correspondent Jacques Fijalkow detailed three research projects that included the following: (1) A description of adult literacy skills; (2) An investigation of how study-abroad students were integrated…

This is a compilation of reports from international research correspondents on the topic of emergent reading. The report includes 14 separate reports on Nigeria, China, Hong Kong, Israel, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Estonia, Italy, Canada, Mexico, United States, Argentina, and Chile. Overall, reports on the topic of emergent readers have…

Ethnographic "New Literacy Studies" question the idea that literacy as such has any uniform effects, arguing instead that effects of literacy inhere in the social practices that impart it. What change, then, does literacy produce where it arrived from two opposed sets of practices? In Quechua-and Aymara-speaking villages on the high…

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 study evaluated the validity, reliability, and utility of five of the six subtests of Clay's (2002) Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement (OS), including Letter Identification, Word Reading, Writing Vocabulary, Hearing and Recording Sounds in Words, and Text Reading. In addition to a review of studies providing assessment of the…