From the Editors

Abstract

Dear Colleagues, The transition of the International Reading Association to the International Literacy Association has been the result of an evolution of ideas and understandings about how we define the field. For some, the adoption of literacy in the association's name was merely the formalization of a de facto identity already held by many. Reading has not been replaced, but rather subsumed by a broader and more comprehensive descriptor, one that better captures the nature of the research happening in the field in the 21st century. With reverence to the past, we have ventured into our next era, meshing old with new and borrowing from knowledge generated from a variety of disciplines. The five peer-reviewed articles featured in this issue of Reading Research Quarterly could be viewed similarly, presenting cutting-edge research that builds on the past, examines new approaches, and has implications for practice and additional research that might transfer across populations. McGee and her colleagues bridge old and new in their investigation of young children's actions and strategic use of sources of information at a point of difficulty in reading. In the study, students’ actions at point of difficulty for Reading Recovery students reading at grade level at the end of the year are compared with those of Reading Recovery students who were not yet on grade level. The researchers found that all readers increased their use of graphic information, using it both alone and in conjunction with contextual information, and decreased their use of contextual information alone. More importantly, the researchers identified two new categories of error episodes: single action and action chain. Students who were at grade level in reading at the end of the year increased their use of action chains, whereas students below grade level did not. Tighe and Schatschneider make a new and considerable contribution to the research on morphological awareness and the interplay between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. Their investigation is particularly compelling because it ventures into new territory on several fronts. Never before has the factor structure of morphological awareness in Adult Basic Education (ABE) students been explored, nor have ABE students ever been the subjects of research differentiating morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. Results from the study, generated through confirmatory factor analyses, support a multidimensional view of morphological awareness and provide the basis for a preliminary framework for understanding the construct and its interaction with vocabulary knowledge. Do emergent bilingual children borrow syntactic skills from their native language to understand a new one? In a fascinating study of Chinese–English learners in grades 1–3, Siu and Ho consider the import and impact of syntactic skills in three applications. A rigorous research design and analysis of the data yielded significant findings related to syntactical knowledge, many of which have cross-cultural implications for literacy instruction. In one particularly interesting component of the study, Siu and Ho examine cross-language transfer to determine whether syntactic knowledge in one language supports comprehension in another—putting to the test Cummins's hypothesis asserting that underlying abilities in literacy transfer across languages. Academic vocabulary has long been an area of interest for literacy researchers. Ucceli and her colleagues move the research in a new direction, beyond this single content-specific concept, to consider the impact of the more comprehensive construct of academic language. Conceptualized as CALS (core academic-language skills), this new expanded construct encompasses a battery of connected skills thought to support reading comprehension across content areas. Children in grades 4–6 were given the CALS-I, a robust and innovative instrument. Researchers looked for variability in students’ CALS-I scores by grade, socioeconomic status, and English proficiency. Scores on assessments of academic vocabulary and word-reading fluency, along with social and demographic factors, served as covariates. This research yielded significant results relevant to the field and future studies, including the finding that CALS are independent predictors of reading comprehension even when controlling for academic vocabulary, fluency, and sociodemographic factors. “So, you can write me a beautiful two-page paper, but I'm only grading the first 26 lines,” said a teacher attempting to teach her students to adhere to the 26-line maximum that they would encounter in their state's new mandated assessment. Comments such as these are considered in Davis and Willson's insightful and thought-provoking case study examining test-centric literacy practices during a testing transition in the State of Texas. Davis and Willson provide observations and commentary from the teachers, who have been “conscripted into participation in a complex data economy.” Scrupulous coding procedures and practices led the authors to suggest that transfer avoidance, managerial partitioning, and overreaching inferences are largely responsible for the persistence of test-centric practices. Smith, A.B., & Jones, X.Y. (2015). Article title. Journal Name. Advance online publication. doi:123456789 Linda B. Gambrell Susan B. Neuman