This article discusses data arising from a longitudinal study of the attitudes, beliefs, and experiences of preservice teachers regarding the use of popular culture in the primary literacy curriculum in England. Eighteen students took part in a series of interviews throughout their three-year initial teacher education course. Data were inductively…

This study examines children's uses of reading resources in neighborhood public libraries that have been transformed to "level the playing field." Through foundation funding (US$20 million), the public library system of Philadelphia converted neighborhood branch libraries into a technologized modern urban library system, hoping to…

In this article, the authors discuss aspects of Response to Intervention (RTI) that appear to be promising for the field of reading, and those that they view as problematic. Unlike many earlier models of innovation in special education service delivery, there is some research indicating promise. Most of that research has been conducted with…

Leveled books originally selected by or produced for use in Reading Recovery or its regular classroom initiative are now also widely used in regular and special classrooms having no affiliation with Reading Recovery. The frequent use of these leveled books in settings other than Reading Recovery raises an important question: Do books leveled for…

Two studies were designed to investigate the role of morphemic structure on students' word reading. The first study asked whether familiar morphemes in words facilitate word reading for elementary students. Results showed that lower and upper elementary students read words with two morphemes (derived words with a base word and one suffix, such as…

This study describes the process by which a circuit board manufacturing company became certified in an international quality control program known as ISO 9002. Particular attention is paid to how quality documents were made and used in actual practice and to the relationship between these standardized procedures (official literacies) and…

Eric Hobsbawm, perhaps the preeminent historian writing in English about the 19th and 20th centuries, previewed his encyclopedic account of the last 100 years with descriptions of the organizationally, collectively, and individually brutalizing effects of the intense round of wars, revolutions, and economic fluctuations that were the hallmark of…

Most past research findings suggest that phonological deficit is unique to developmental dyslexia insofar as alphabetic languages are concerned. The present study investigated the existence of any similar unique reading-related cognitive deficits associated with developmental dyslexia in a nonalphabetic script, Chinese. The pattern of comorbidity…

This longitudinal study across the primary grades examined whether there were patterns in feedback strategies parents provided to children's miscues during shared book reading, and whether parents changed their use of those strategies over time as their children's reading skills increased. Parents of normally developing beginning readers were…

In this commentary, the author identifies what, in her opinion, has been left out of the discussion of "scale up." She expresses particular concern that the rhetoric of scaling up, and the concomitant assertion of scientific underpinnings for programs brought to scale, may overstate the relation of the developers' programs and program materials to…

This theoretical article examines reading processes using chaos theory as an analogy. Three principles of chaos theory are identified and discussed, then related to reading processes as revealed through eye movement research. Used as an analogy, the chaos theory principle of sensitive dependence contributes to understanding the difficulty in…

Scholars who are drawn to qualitative research methodologies represent a diverse group of disciplines and fields. They also represent themselves as researchers and the theoretical frameworks in which they work quite differently. Indeed, it was this diversity in representation that initially motivated us to propose a New Directions feature on…

This study analyzes the composition by a high school senior of a house design for a class in architectural design. He produced this text in relation to the readings of that text by his teacher and other potential readers. The authors take a Vygotskian perspective to understand the settings, goals, and tools through which he composed his…

The purpose of this naturalistic experiment was to discover the operative elements of an evidence-based reform effort that accounted for growth in student achievement. The reform was implemented in 13 schools around the United States over the course of two years. The authors studied the impact of both school-level programmatic elements and…

Fifteen regular grade 2 teachers used a set of 150 written lessons that were designed to develop, over the course of a school year, low and normally achieving students' ability to decode by analogy (i.e., to read unknown words using known words). The lessons provided (1) a planned sequence for teaching phonic elements including common spelling…