This study explores informants' experiences in a reading/writing program that paired eighth-grade language arts students with elderly volunteers. Twenty-three pairs were followed over an academic year as they read books in common, corresponded in response journals, and met in person at program social events. Through analysis of interviews, their…

This study investigated the effects of orthographic depth on reading acquisition in alphabetic, syllabic, and logographic scripts. Children between 6 and 15 years old read aloud in transparent syllabic Japanese hiragana, alphabets of increasing orthographic depth (Albanian, Greek, English), and orthographically opaque Japanese kanji ideograms,…

Despite the popularity of self-published teen zines, few studies have been conducted of the adolescent girls who write and read them. Past research on teens' reading and writing shows that adolescents read and write along stereotypical or gendered lines. This study explores the out-of-school literacy practices of three adolescent girls who write…

Maya K. David reports an interesting view of reading in Malaysia through the eyes of graduate student Mohd Nazri bin Hamid (2003), who conducted an exploratory study about the culture of reading in an academy of Islamic studies. The purposes of Nazri's investigation were (a) to examine undergraduate students' reading habits, (b) to offer a…

This commentary discusses the methodological challenges of researching the intersection of online and offline activities of an adolescent girl engaged in instant messaging. If the New Literacy Studies stance that literacy practices are locally situated is accepted, a methodology for interrogating the multiple online and offline contexts that…

Forty-three years ago, Bloomfield and Barnhart (1961) published "Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach." Their notion of linguistics-informed literacy instruction was to carefully control the vocabulary of texts in order to exploit phonetic regularities. In Lesson 4 students read, "A man at bat had a tan cap" (p. 63). Even as far along as Lesson…

The purpose of the study was (a) to examine the development of four sublexical fluency skills over the second semester of kindergarten and (b) to identify the predictors of fluency level (estimated at the end of kindergarten) and growth. Ninety-two kindergarten children enrolled in six full-day kindergarten classrooms participated. The students…

A counterbalanced, within-subjects design was carried out to study the efficacy of electronic books in fostering kindergarten children's emergent story understanding. The study compared effects of children's independent reading of stories electronically with effects of printed books read aloud by adults. Participants were 18 four- to five-year-old…

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…

This exploratory study analyzed longitudinal data from 18 institutions to track the literacy development of 1,054 students during the first three years of college. Reading comprehension and attitude toward literacy activities were assessed at the beginning and end of the study. Students responded annually to questionnaires about college…

This essay seeks to broaden theoretical paradigms commonly used in the social sciences to analyze representations of gender, especially girlhood, in children's literature. In particular, this project seeks to add to liberal feminist frameworks for conceptualizing textual representations of gender and sexuality in literacy studies. Liberal…

Adults bring with them a wealth of literate experiences into adult education classrooms. And yet, they and the programs they enter often do not see such experiences as significant to their learning. This is surprising because it is often in the out-of-school experiences where the adults demonstrate the greatest sense of agency and ability with…

This study investigated the trajectories of preschool and first-grade childrens development of reading skills, as well as the cognitive and social antecedents of that development. One-hundred and ninety-six 5- to 6-year-old children were tested in October and April of their preschool year and again in the first grade. Data included measures of…

In this article we analyze the intersections and disjunctures between everyday (home, community, peer group) and school funds of knowledge and discourse (Gee, 1996) that frame the school-based, content area literacy practices of middle school-aged youth in a predominantly Latino/a, urban community of Detroit, Michigan, in the United States. Using…

A team of first-grade teachers began to question their literacy/phonics program, which used a whole-class format for instruction. The teachers felt that teaching the whole class did not allow them to meet the diverse needs of all their students. One of the teachers introduced the rest of the team to developmental-spelling research (i.e., research…