Knowledge about writers' eye movements and their effects on the writing process, and its product--the finally edited text--is still limited. Previous research has demonstrated that there are differences between reading texts written by someone else and reading one's own emerging text and that writers frequently look back into their own texts…

Research into "discourse synthesis" examines the ways in which writers make use of, and transform, multiple other texts in writing their own. It is intertextual research that has blurred boundaries of various kinds, not only the boundary between the processes of reading and writing but also boundaries across disciplines as well as…

Orthographic knowledge is the understanding of how spoken language is represented in print. However, the terms used to describe the two levels of orthographic knowledge, lexical and sublexical orthographic knowledge, have been variably defined and inconsistently measured, potentially contributing to discrepancies in research findings.…

Despite the early emergence of oral argumentation, written argumentation is slow to develop, insensitive to alternative perspectives, and generally of poor quality. These findings are unsettling because high quality argumentative writing is expected throughout the curriculum and needed in an increasingly competitive workplace that requires…

Direct instruction of reading strategies, such as the 'structure strategy', is demonstrated to be effective for the development of more mature and skilled reading processes in struggling readers. This instructional intervention approach, aimed at directly improving reading ability, can be used in combination with text simplification. Text…

In Higher Education (HE), writers need to regulate their writing processes in order to achieve their communicative goals. Although critical for academic success and knowledge construction, writing regulation processes have been mainly researched in compulsory education rather than in HE, with no systematic review focused on this context. The…

This paper presents a special issue on writing around the globe. Researchers from across the world describe writing practices in their country using a wide variety of methodology. The papers show that while there are many similarities in writing instruction from one country to the next, there are also many differences. As a result, the authors…

What determines consonant doubling in English? This question is pursued by using a large lexical database to establish systematic correlations between spelling, phonology and morphology. The main insights are: Consonant doubling is most regular at morpheme boundaries. It can be described in graphemic terms alone, i.e. without reference to…

Fluency and rate-based assessments, such as curriculum-based measurement, are frequently used to screen and evaluate student progress. The application of such measures are especially prevalent within special education and response to intervention models of prevention and early intervention. Although there is an extensive research and professional…

The primary objective of this special issue is to synthesize results from recent reading fluency research endeavors, and to link these findings to practical uses of reading curriculum-based measurement (R-CBM) tools. Taken together, the manuscripts presented in this issue discuss measurement work related to new metrics of indexing student reading…

In this article, we examine why writing is important, how it develops, and effective writing practices. We situate the 5 articles in this special issue of "Reading and Writing" in this literature, providing a context for the contribution of each paper.

This paper provides a short overview of current issues in research on continuous reading in non-Roman orthographies. At the same time it also serves as an introduction to the present Reading and Writing Special Issue on this topic. The main questions examined in the contributions to this volume are closely related to issues that have been central…

A focused scientific research effort on writing research and its relationship to language development and reading is needed to address the writing and broader literacy needs of today's and tomorrow's learners and workers. In the United States, as well as in many other nations, research on writing has been neglected in relation to the emphasis on…

A sample of Swahili-speaking probands with reading difficulties was identified from a large representative sample of 1,500 school children in the rural areas of Tanzania. Families of these probands (n = 88) were invited to participate in the study. The proband and his/her siblings received a battery of reading-related tasks and performance on…

To test the hypothesis that the etiology of reading difficulties may differ for males and females in more severely impaired samples, reading performance data from monozygotic (MZ), same-sex dizygotic (DZ[subscript ss]), and opposite-sex dizygotic (DZ[subscript os]) twin pairs were analyzed using a model-fitting implementation of the DeFries-Fulker…