Dear Colleaguues, This issue of Reading Research Quarterly includes a range of studies that investigated interventions designed to enhance literacy learning. Each of the studies explored how interventions can be used to support student success without simplifying curriculum or restricting students’ participation in reading and writing experiences. This issue begins with an article investigating the associations between the features of shared book reading and the narrative production and comprehension skills of young English learners (ELs). Capitalizing on existing studies on shared book reading and ELs, Gámez, González, and Urbin explored how shared book reading in kindergarten supports all three cues described by the emergentist coalition model: perceptual, linguistic, and social. Specifically, the authors examined the influence of teachers’ gesture use and extratextual talk during shared book reading on kindergarten ELs’ narrative skills. In addition to describing critical features of shared book reading for ELs, Gámez and colleagues describe how the variability in teachers’ behaviors surrounding book reading was associated with variation in students’ outcome scores. This article adds to the growing body of research on how shared book-reading practices can support language learning. The next article describes how speech recognition technology was used as a transcription assistant to support eight struggling readers in first grade. With the understanding that children's oral vocabulary is larger than their spelling lexicon, Baker delved into whether students could overcome the simplification of their stories by using speech recognition technology to retain their oral vocabulary when transcribing a story. Baker describes how speech recognition technology can capitalize on the language experience approach while mitigating some of the criticisms that it typically faces. The findings of this study suggest that a supportive classroom and appropriate use of speech recognition technology can support students in generating transcriptions and reduce the need for teacher assistance. Baker acknowledges and describes several cautions and limitations of using speech recognition technology with students. In the next article, Collins, Lee, Fox, and Madigan describe another assisted writing intervention used to support students in low-performing urban elementary schools. This article describes the findings from the study of a three-year program called Writing Intensive Reading Comprehension. Unlike many current educational interventions, which restrict low-performing students to reductive instructional materials and methods focused on constrained skills, Writing Intensive Reading Comprehension stresses the reading–writing connection. Based on their findings, Collins and colleagues describe how bringing together reading and writing through the use of assisted writing instruction with thinksheets enhances reading comprehension. The authors explain the various thinksheets and the importance of each thinksheet component used by participating students during the study. The authors explain that the questions posed on the thinksheets were not used to assess students’ understanding; rather, they were designed to send students back into their reading and earlier writing to identify key ideas to deepen their understanding of their reading. This study also revealed that students who received the intervention for a longer period of time made greater gains in their reading. Based on their findings, the authors suggest practical applications for using assisted writing to develop reading comprehension. Yeung, Ho, Chan, and Chung continue the focus on writing in the next article, which examines the transcription skills, oral language skills, working memory, and written composition of Chinese students. Although many studies have focused on writing development in alphabetic languages, few have explored Chinese writing development. Yeung and colleagues expand our understanding of Chinese writing development by describing a model of the cognitive processes involved in Chinese written composition. This study builds on previous studies of Chinese writing that examined significant predictors in Chinese writing, specifically transcription skills, oral language skills, or working memory. Unlike previous studies that examined each of these predictors in isolation, this study investigated transcription skills, oral language skills, and working memory in conjunction. Based on their findings, the authors highlight how greater emphasis on transcription skills instruction could benefit the development of students’ composition skills across elementary grades. In the final article of this issue, Kim and colleagues examine the impact of an intervention for adolescents with reading difficulties. The Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention (STARI) program addresses a variety of reading components, including strategies for literal and deep comprehension. The authors designed the intervention so it would connect reluctant readers with cognitively challenging texts and activities while simultaneously developing basic reading skills. Capitalizing on program characteristics of Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction, Kim and colleagues designed the STARI intervention to markedly contrast with existing adolescent literacy interventions. The authors explain that improvements in reading subskills, the focus of many interventions, are not sufficient for deep comprehension. An effective intervention needs to provide students with texts and reading tasks that are complex and open-ended enough to support sophisticated reasoning. The findings of this study suggest that reading engagement is a malleable factor that contributed to gains in multiple dimensions of reading skills for STARI students. This issue of Reading Research Quarterly expands our knowledge of effective interventions and the generalizability of the simple view of writing. These articles offer explorations of the reading–writing connection and solidify the importance of supporting reading and writing for all students. Each article in this issue highlights that all students deserve access to rigorous and relevant materials while receiving support to help them become motivated and engaged readers and writers. Linda B. Gambrell Susan B. Neuman
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Jan 28, 2024
J. Enrique Hinostroza + 3
Open Access