They Say You Can Do Phonemic Awareness Instruction “In the Dark”, But Should You? A Critical Evaluation of the Trend Toward Advanced Phonemic Awareness Training

A trend has emerged across schools in the United States in which phonemic awareness is viewed as much more than a component of beginning reading instruction. This perspective argues that “phonemic proficiency”, evidenced by mastery with advanced tasks such as phoneme elision or substitution, is an important target for assessment and instruction well beyond initial grades. Daily phonemic awareness instruction outside of print are hallmarks of the perspective, which has influenced state policies on reading instruction. This paper evaluated the empirical and theoretical basis for advanced phonemic awareness training. Although promoted as evidence-based, proficiency on so-called advanced phonemic tasks is not more strongly related to reading or more discriminative of difficulties than other phoneme-level skills, not necessary for skilled reading, and is more likely a product of learning to read and spell than a cause. Additionally, reading outcomes are stronger when phonemic awareness is taught with print, there is no evidence that advanced phonemic awareness training benefits reading instruction or intervention, and prominent theories of reading development do not align with the claims. We conclude with implications for policy-makers and educators, and discuss how experimental research could address open questions about phonemic awareness instruction.

A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Reading Comprehension Interventions on the Reading Comprehension Outcomes of Struggling Readers in Third Through 12th Grades

Informed by theories of reading comprehension and prior reviews of reading comprehension intervention, this meta-analysis uniquely contributes to the literature because it describes the relative effects of various approaches to comprehension intervention for struggling readers in Grades 3 through 12. Findings from 64 studies demonstrate significant positive effects of reading comprehension intervention on comprehension outcomes ( g = .59, p < .001, 95% confidence interval [CI] [0.47, 0.74], τ2 = .31). A metaregression model indicated significantly higher effects associated with researcher-developed measures, background knowledge instruction, and strategy instruction, and significantly lower effects associated with instructional enhancements. Grade level, metacognitive approaches, and study quality did not moderate effects. Findings support the use of background knowledge instruction and strategy instruction to support comprehension of struggling readers in upper elementary and beyond.

Effects of Spacing on Sentence Reading in Chinese

Given that Chinese writing conventions lack inter-word spacing, understanding whether and how readers of Chinese segment regular unspaced Chinese writing into words is an important question for theories of reading. This study examined the processing outcomes of introducing spaces to written Chinese sentences in varying positions based on native speaker consensus. The measure of consensus for every character transition in our stimuli sentences was the percent of raters who placed a word boundary in that position. The eye movements of native readers of Chinese were recorded while they silently read original unspaced sentences and their experimentally manipulated counterparts for comprehension. We introduced two types of spaced sentences: one with spaces inserted at every probable word boundary (heavily spaced), and another with spaces placed only at highly probable word boundaries (lightly spaced). Linear mixed-effects regression models showed that heavily spaced sentences took identical time to read as unspaced ones despite the shortened fixation times on individual words (Experiment 1). On the other hand, reading times for lightly spaced sentences and words were shorter than those for unspaced ones (Experiment 2). Thus, spaces proved to be advantageous but only when introduced at highly probable word boundaries. We discuss methodological and theoretical implications of these findings.

Sensuous reading in the Legatus divinae pietatis

Devotional practices in the later European Middle Ages were highly somatic, and they utilized the human sensorium to convey, incite, and engender knowledge and experiences of the divine. Reading does not normally stand out as one of the more somatic devotional practices, but as demonstrated by the example of the Legatus divinae pietatis, a devotional text written at the convent of Helfta around the end of the thirteenth century, reading was indeed imagined as a somatic, devotional experience that engaged the senses. In this article, I argue that the Legatus portrays a form of devotional reading that invokes all the senses in an effort to unite the book, the reader, and her community with the divine. Drawing on medieval conceptualizations of the human sensorium and theories of reading, my analyses of the Legatus’s sensual language, evocative imagery, and scenes of reading elucidate the embodied reading practices that the Legatus’s writers portrayed as fundamental to their communal, devotional lives.

Bréviaire des lecteurs – Cioran et les enjeux du lire

In this article, we propose to identify some theoretical issues on the reading act, as they are constantly formulated by the Romanian-born French writer Cioran (1911-1995) in his works and notebooks, constituting by their unsystematic characteristics an authentic readers’ (fragmented) handbook. After the identification of several types of reading that Cioran mentions in his writings, we will mainly focus our observations on comparing and associating them to the theories of reading of his time (considering some concepts and aesthetic practices as defined by Hans Robert Jauss, Roland Barthes or Antoine Compagnon).

Problemy odbioru i odbiorcy w pracach Jurija Łotmana. Część 1

The article presents Yuri Lotman’s reflections on the reception of a literary work in the context of contemporary theories of reading. The first part of the article demonstrates Lotman’s approach in an evolutionary perspective from Lectures on structural poetics (1964) to Culture and explosion (1992). The second part considers Lotman’s approach with reference to numerous contemporary conceptions of reception and indicates a close resemblance to Umberto Eco’s ideas, which were developed in his book Lector in fabula.

Are people consistent when reading nonwords aloud on different occasions?

Tests of nonword reading have been instrumental in adjudicating between theories of reading and in assessing individuals’ reading skill in educational and clinical practice. It is generally assumed that the way in which readers pronounce nonwords reflects their long-term knowledge of spelling–sound correspondences that exist in the writing system. The present study found considerable variability in how the same adults read the same 50 nonwords across five sessions. This variability was not all random: Nonwords that consisted of graphemes that had multiple possible pronunciations in English elicited more intraparticipant variation. Furthermore, over time, shifts in participants’ responses occurred such that some pronunciations became used more frequently, while others were pruned. We discuss possible mechanisms by which session-to-session variability arises and implications that our findings have for interpreting snapshot-based studies of nonword reading. We argue that it is essential to understand mechanisms underpinning this session-to-session variability in order to interpret differences across individuals in how they read nonwords aloud on a single occasion.

INVESTIGATING LEARNERS’ OBSTACLES IN SECOND LANGUAGE READING COMPREHENSION

Skill in reading texts written in English as a foreign language constitutes a fundamental element of the establishment of English curriculum in Indonesia. The aim of this article is to investigate and explore the obstacles and difficulties faced by Indonesians in their learning activities which hampering the learners in gaining comprehension, and to view the pedagogy from the broader perspective on the theories of reading process. As the writer found, the learners are lack of language system understanding, lack of reading strategies, poor in recognizing the types of reading comprehension. Therefor, through literary study as the research method, the result appeared that the obstacles and problems faced by the Indonesian affected by cultural background, English teaching and learning process, and approaches in teaching and learning.

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers an alternative strain of anticolonialism that does not seek national sovereignty, authority, and political recognition, but advocates instead inexpertise, unknowing, unintelligibility, and collective unrecognizability. Early twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success. This book shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of impossibility: a world without colonialism. To trace this impossible political theory, this book foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of four thinkers, Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise, but as a way of rather to disavow mastery and expertise altogether. Reading was antiauthoritarian precisely because it urged readers to refuse authorship and, relatedly, authority. To become or remain a reader, and divest oneself of authorial claims, was to challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics.