Reading Research QuarterlyVolume 55, Issue 1 p. 5-7 From the EditorsFree Access From the Editors First published: 26 December 2019 https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.293AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Dear Colleagues, We write this on the eve of the publishing of the 2019 What's Hot in Literacy Report, which is the result of a biennial survey completed by the International Literacy Association (in press) that takes the temperature of the literacy dialogue and notes the changing trends from year to year. This year, topics such as identifying effective instructional strategies for struggling learners; building early literacy skills through a balanced approach; increasing equity and opportunities; providing access to high-quality, diverse books and content; and increasing professional learning represented the topics that respondents felt were particularly trending this past year. (The 2019 report will be available online very soon at https://literacyworldwide.org/get-resources/whats-hot-report.) These topics raise important questions that link research, theory, and practice. In this issue, we ask questions similar to these: What kinds of activities, instructional approaches, or knowledge about language are useful for becoming literate? How do these different experiences and understandings contribute to language and literacy learning? For this issue of Reading Research Quarterly (RRQ), we present the findings of six research projects that answer these questions using distinct methods, with different populations working within unique contexts. Research contexts range from Finland, China, and Canada to the United States, and participants range from preschoolers through adults. Participants also come from myriad language backgrounds, and researchers used a range of research methods to answer their questions. As such, these articles reflect the power of diversity—in terms of settings, participants, languages, and research perspectives—to build deeper understandings of becoming literate. As we explained in “Our Editorial Vision” in our first published issue as the RRQ editors, “under our editorship, we aim for RRQ to be a journal that explores different conceptions of literacy studied through different research traditions, because it is only via this broad conceptualization that we will truly deepen understandings and build equity” (Goodwin & Jiménez, 2019, p. 10). This issue embodies this stance. We hope you find the information reported here useful for your own work and thinking about how language and literacy learning takes place and also how it can be enhanced and improved. In the first article, “Gaming Literacies: Spatiality, Materiality, and Analog Learning in a Digital Age,” Antero García explains that “I explore how worldbuilding, collaborative play, and synthesis of multimodal resources shape and are shaped by the literacy practices in tabletop gaming.” Garcia answers the questions, What do tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons have to do with literacy? Why are young people so willing to invest extensive time and a good deal of effort to master these games? What sorts of activities do players of these games engage in, and how do they draw from the linguistic and textual resources encountered in different places and materials to be recognized as knowledgeable members of the gaming community? He notes that in distinction from digital gaming, “in tabletop games, people power the gaming system, and print-based books and physical objects function as the software.” He concludes that “these [tabletop gaming spaces] are rich environments for collaborative and peer-supported learning.” Next, in “The Role of Awareness of Cross-Language Suffix Correspondences in Second-Language Reading Comprehension,” Katie Lam, Xi (Becky) Chen, and S. Hélène Deacon posit that “awareness of cross-language suffix correspondences is a bridge across which students can bring morphological awareness in one language to support reading comprehension in another.” As a result, the authors explored “how students bring morphological awareness from one language to their reading comprehension in another….and whether awareness of cross-language suffix correspondences support[s] reading comprehension across languages.” Lam et al. conclude that for grade 2 students in an early French immersion program in Canada, “awareness of cross-language suffix correspondences [i]s a novel aspect of morphological awareness that is specifically useful in second-language reading comprehension.” The authors then recommend that “it might be worthwhile to draw students’ attention to structures shared between their language(s), where these exist, from the earliest points of instruction.” What this adds to the literature is an understanding of how cross-linguistic supports may occur—in this case, via understanding of the role of suffixes across orthographies. In the third article, Erin M. McTigue, Oddny Judith Solheim, Wendi K. Zimmer, and Per Henning Uppstad share a systematic review and meta-analysis of research on 28 empirical studies of GraphoGame, a computer-assisted word-reading instructional game. They asked, “How can we better harness the power of educational technology for the promotion of word reading?” They focused their research on GraphoGame because it “represents a common manner that technology is integrated into decoding instruction.” GraphoGame was developed in Finland, where it has demonstrated success in alleviating dyslexia. The authors found, however, that implementation of the game in a wide variety of contexts around the world “did not yield an overall meaningful effect size (g = −0.02),” but studies that included a high level of adult interaction with students yielded an average positive effect size (g = 0.48). McTigue et al. call for more research using critical, affective, qualitative, and mixed methods in addition to quantitative research designs to expand understanding and possibilities for student learning. In “Orthography Facilitates Memory for Proper Names in Emergent Readers,” using connectionist theory, Robin O'Leary and Linnea C. Ehri argue that “knowledge of the general writing system serves as a mnemonic that bonds spellings of individual words to their pronunciations in memory.” These authors wanted to know whether “preschoolers and early kindergartners who are not yet reading could use their letter knowledge and phonemic awareness to learn the pronunciations of unfamiliar words mediated by spelling.” In an intriguing experiment, O'Leary and Ehri found that their young participants “recalled proper names better when they had seen spellings” of these names rather than randomly assigned numbers. The authors call this an orthographic facilitation effect and demonstrate that such an effect occurs naturally with exposure rather than explicit instruction. In the fifth article, “Teaching Bilingual Learners: Effects of a Language-Based Reading Intervention on Academic Language and Reading Comprehension in Grades 4 and 5,” C. Patrick Proctor, Rebecca D. Silverman, Jeffrey R. Harring, Renata Love Jones, and Anna M. Hartranft wanted to know how to improve the standardized reading and language outcomes for fourth- and fifth-grade bilingual students. The authors presented students with an instructional intervention “called CLAVES (an acronym for comprehension, linguistic awareness, and vocabulary in English and Spanish, meaning keys or clues in Spanish).” CLAVES focuses broadly on language instruction via vocabulary, morphology, and syntax, alongside guided reading, discussion, and writing activities. Proctor et al. were interested in finding out how this approach would differ for students with varying levels of pre-intervention language and literacy. Students made meaningful gains in academic language and reading comprehension. The authors conclude that ultimately, being mindful about academic language as key to both success and oppression in schools is critical. Educators who work with multilingual populations can and should recognize the nuanced and powerful ways in which languages can be used to marginalize, racialize, and silence students. In “What Is the Influence of Peer Feedback and Author Response on Chinese University Students’ English Writing Performance?” Xin Zhang and John E. McEneaney describe their instructional approach designed to improve the English writing of students in the southwestern part of China. Zhang and McEneaney then measured the effect this had on students' English writing in the context of English as a foreign language. Because of very large class sizes, students in many of these classes too often receive only superficial feedback from instructors that does not help them improve their writing or their understanding of how their writing is evaluated. As hypothesized, students improved their English writing because of the greater quantity and quality of the feedback they received. In addition, by providing feedback to their peers, students also learned to “view their own writing with a more critical eye.” In other words, feedback is valuable to the receiver and the giver. This research also provides evidence of the value of student feedback in contexts where instructors work with large classes. Finally, in “Automaticity and Control: How Do Executive Functions and Reading Fluency Interact in Predicting Reading Comprehension?” Michael J. Kieffer and Joanna A. Christodoulou wanted to know how reading fluency fuels reading comprehension either independently or in interaction with executive functions (EFs). More specifically, they wanted to know if reading fluency mediates or moderates the relation between EFs and reading comprehension. The authors found that EFs uniquely predict reading fluency, which in turn uniquely predicts reading comprehension. They also found that EFs were more predictive for readers with higher reading fluency than for readers with lower reading fluency. In other words, EFs played a stronger role for fluent readers, which Kieffer and Christodoulou theorize suggests that “the contributions of EFs and reading fluency to reading comprehension are multiplicative rather than additive.” As a result, shortcomings in one cannot compensate for the other. They conclude that both EFs and reading fluency merit instructional time and energy and that such instruction should include metacognitive skills. Overall, we are excited about the way that these different articles build understanding. We look forward to their impact on theory, research, and practice. References Goodwin, A.P., & Jiménez, R.T. (2019). Our editorial vision [Editorial]. Reading Research Quarterly, 54(1), 9– 12. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.236 International Literacy Association. (in press). What's hot in literacy report. Newark, DE: Author. Volume55, Issue1January/February/March 2020Pages 5-7 ReferencesRelatedInformation