Founded on the importance of the imagination according to Greene (1995) and set by the Executive Summary of the 911 Commission Report, the mixed methods grounded theory study looks at a correlation between a set of instruction practices recognized by Egan (2008) for nourishing and developing the imagination and low-progress adolescent students’ comprehension. Descriptive data are provided on the school, students, teachers, and district where the study was conducted to illustrate the limitation and delimitations of the study. The study is limited to low-progress adolescent students as identified by the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test and uses pre and post Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading (FAIR) mandated and administered by Orange County to establish comprehension and determine statistical significance. Participant and non-participant observations are used to triangulate and co-triangulate data to determine the correlation between the frequency of select instructional practices and students’ comprehending as evidence by their FAIR reading and Maze scores. Observation of student performance suggests that attention to the implementation of the instruction practices of using poetry, text sets, and sensory stimulation has potential in nurturing low progress adolescent students’ imagination and strengthening their cognitive feed-forward mechanism. The data adds to the existing body of work on the interactive nature of reading (Rumelhart, 1994) by elaborating on low progress adolescent students’ ability to predict and anticipate; concluding that convergent and divergent thinking, making inter-textual connections, and creating mental models are necessary sub-factors to nourish the imagination and need to be taken into account in instruction to assist low-progress adolescent students in comprehending and developing a defensible interpretation

This action research study was conducted with 7th grade life science students at a public middle school in central Florida. The author used Reciprocal Teaching (RT) as described by Annemarie Palincsar and Anne Brown (1984) to examine changes in student comprehension when reading their life science textbook and changes in how the students used the predicting, questioning, and summarizing strategies. The RT strategies ask students to employ 4 strategies: predict what they will read, generate questions about what was read, clarify any ideas that were not understood in the reading, and summarize the main idea of the reading. Students were given a pre and post reading comprehension test, they completed reading response worksheets to record their predictions, questions, clarifications, and summaries. Students were explicitly taught the 4 strategies prior to using them and the strategies were reinforced through teacher modeling (using think aloud teaching to show students how to use the strategies) and expert scaffolding (giving students the support needed while using the strategies). The teacher-researcher also examined if the students showed change in their level of proficiency when using the strategies after they had been taught them. Analysis of data revealed that student comprehension did increase after being taught the four reading strategies. Data also showed that students became increasingly more proficient when using the strategies as the study progressed. Data analysis also uncovered the unexpected pattern of increased student participation during whole-class and reading group discussions. Further research is needed to examine the effects of teaching highly proficient students specific reading strategies and to see how the explicit instruction of reading strategies affects student participation and achievement during inquiry-based laboratory investigations.

Syftet med denna studie är att få djupare kunskap om hur några lärare arbetar med flerspråkiga elevers läsförståelse i årskurserna F-3. För att få svar på forskningsfrågan användes två kvalitativa metoder. Vi intervjuade och observerade åtta lärare från tre olika skolor. Resultatet visar att lärarna använder olika strategier som att låta eleverna tänka högt,aktivera förförståelse, skapa inre bilder, hypoteser, låta elever ifrågasätta texten, läraren ställer frågor kring texten, läraren klargör otydligheter och sammanfattar texten. Vår studievisar även att lärarna använder sig av bildstöd, kroppsspråk, ord- och begreppsförklaringar som stöttning samt att lärarna upplever flera hinder i läsförståelseundervisningen. Lärarna motiverar eleverna på olika sätt kring läsförståelse. Studiens slutsats är att lärarna arbetar på olika sätt och med olika strategier för att motivera och skapa förutsättningar för att utveckla lärandet, utifrån elevernas behov i ett flerspråkigt klassrum.

Denna studie undersöker hypertextuell skönlitteratur och dess inverkan på viktiga aspekter i läsutvecklingen hos lågstadieelever. Detta utförs genom en kvantitativ enkätundersökning i sex klasser i årskurs 3. Hälften av klasserna fick läsa en berättelse med hypertextuell progression medan de andra tre fick läsa berättelsen med en traditionellt linjär progressionsutformning och därefter svara på identiska enkäter. Lärarna i klasserna fick också svara på en enkät. Genom jämförelse mellan klassernas svar har texternas inverkan på läsförståelse, motivation och upplevd svårighetsgrad kunnat utläsas. Studien har funnit en signifikant ökning av läsmotivationen hos de elever som läst den hypertextuella berättelsen.

The study has three different aims. One is to investigate reading comprehension among pupils in grade 4. Another is to trace any difficulties in reading comprehension to linguistic or social difficulties. The study also has a practical purpose in that the problems that exist can be identified and diagnosed earlier so that these pupils can be given extra support. The pupils’ reading comprehension has been tested with texts from their schoolbooks. Three different types of questions have been asked about the content of the texts. The pupils’ decoding ability has been tested with a letter and word-chain test and word comprehension with words from their schoolbook texts. The pupils who were tested are in grade 4 in a school in southern Sweden. There are three classes with a total of 59 pupils, of whom 48 participated in the study. It turns out that there are deficiencies in reading comprehension in several pupils in grade 4. The pupils have great problems with questions which require them to read several lines before they find the answer and with questions where they have to draw their own conclusions and use previous knowledge they were expected to have.

Syftet med denna systematiska litteraturstudie är att med hjälp av tidigare forskning undersöka vilken betydelse boksamtal har för elevers läsförståelse, vilken roll läraren har vid boksamtal, samt hur boksamtal utformas. Studiens resultat bygger på både facklitteratur och vetenskapliga artiklar som hämtats genom databassökningar och manuella sökningar. Resultatet visar att boksamtal är viktigt för att öka elevers läsförståelse, flera källor anger samtal som en väsentlig del för att underlätta elevers förståelse. Resultatet visar även att frågor som läraren använder sig av, är av betydelse vid utformningen av boksamtalen. Det är av vikt att läraren väljer ut relevanta och intresseväckande frågor som möjliggör utformningen. Slutligen visar resultatet att läraren spelar en viktig roll vid boksamtal, då i en roll som samtalsledare.

This is a study about English teachers’ use of audiobooks when working with literature in upper secondary school. This study investigates to what extent and in what ways teachers use audiobooks as well as their attitudes toward them as a teaching tool. This research study also investigates whether teachers believe that audiobooks have a positive effect on students’ reading motivation. The study was conducted through a mixed-method questionnaire, which 24 participating teachers in Sweden answered. The study shows that most teachers are using audiobooks in their literature teaching, hence having an overall positive attitude towards them. However, the reasons for using them vary among the participants. The findings reveal that participating teachers find audiobooks helpful for improving students’ reading and listening comprehension, pronunciation, and reading accuracy. Further, teachers believe that audiobooks help students to show more engagement with the literature, but that they do not have much effect on increasing students’ motivation to read. The results of this study provide insight into some English teachers’ opinions and attitudes toward the audiobook as a teaching tool and this may help other English teachers make better informed choices when they want to incorporate the audiobook into their literature teaching.

The aim of this study was to examine the correlation between reading comprehension and word problem solving in mathematics. The study focuses on how linguistic inclusion or exclusion in primary classrooms affects students' performance in mathematics, mainly in the area of word problem solving. The search for articles have been made in the international databases ERIC and ERC with the keywords: mathematics, primary school, reading comprehension, mathematics education, primary education, primary classroom, reading skills, literacy. The selection of articles was made using a thematic content analysis described by Braun & Clarke (2006).  The result shows that reading comprehension has a decisive role in understanding and navigating word problem solving assignments. The result also indicates that a collaboration between different abilities such as reading comprehension, reasoning ability, logical thinking and arithmetic skills were significant in the outcomes. There were several factors that could affect reading comprehension skills and thus the students' performance. Some of them were the design of the tasks, the students' linguistic background and the access to linguistic aids (Can, 2020; Boonen et al., 2016; Fuchs et al., 2018; Gomez et al., 2020; Patel et al., 2023; Sibanda & Graven, 2018).

Students at risk for reading difficulties often display skills deficits in basic reading skills (e.g., phonological awareness or PA, fluency, and comprehension). Phonological awareness instruction (PAI) and scaffolded instruction have been effective in improving reading skills for all students (National Reading Council, 1998). In relation, Reading to Read (RTR), a remedial reading program based on the methods of applied behavior analysis, direct instruction, and curriculum-based assessment, has been found to improve oral reading fluency and comprehension (e.g., Edwards, Tingstrom, & Cottingham, 1993; Tingstrom, Edwards, & Olmi, 1995). Despite the effectiveness of PAI and RTR in isolation, little research has been conducted to determine effectiveness of PAI and scaffolding combined with the RTR intervention. The purpose of this study was to investigate effectiveness of using PAI in combination with RTR as another instructional method for increasing reading fluency and comprehension. Participants included 5 elementary-aged students who have a special education diagnosis and are from rural southeastern region of the U.S. Data were collected using a single-subject research methodology and included correct words per minute (CWPM), errors per minute (EPM), and percent correct comprehension in all phases for all intervention conditions: (a) PAI, (b) RTR, and (c) PAI + RTR. Data were analyzed using visual inspection or graphical representation assessed by level, trend, and variability around level and trend between the different interventions as it relates to CWPM, EPM, and percent correct comprehension. When examining reading fluency, 1 of the 5 students who received the PAI + RTR interventions improved in reading fluency from baseline to intervention. When examining reading comprehension, all students demonstrated little to no change in percent correct comprehension questions across all conditions and phases. Implications, limitations, and future research relating to the results of this study are also discussed.

A multielement brief experimental analysis was used to improve and extend previous research to compare the impact of listening while reading while following along (LWFA) and listening while reading while not following along (LWNFA) interventions on oral reading comprehension rate (ORCR), reading comprehension levels, and reading fluency in students with reading disabilities. The collected data for each of the eight middle school and junior high special education students who were participants in this study included: (a) words read correct per minute (WPM), (b) errors per minute (EPM), (c) comprehension questions answered correct per passage, and (d) ORCR. The students ranged from 11 to 14 years of age and 7 of the students were male and 1 was female. Student?s standard intelligence scores, as obtained from student records of formal assessment for eligibility for special education services, ranged from 66-116. All students were functioning at the fourth grade instructional level. Analysis by individual suggest that both listening while reading treatment conditions enhanced oral reading comprehension rates, reading comprehension levels, and increased reading fluency as compared to the control condition. Students displayed higher ORCR, total comprehension questions answered correctly, answered more factual questions correctly, and WPM under LWFA as compared to LWNFA and the control conditions. However, fewer EPM were reported overall for the LWNFA and higher reading comprehension inference questions answered correctly were also observed. Statistically significant differences were noted in reading fluency measures such that more words were read under LWFA as compared to the control condition and fewer errors were reported under LWFA as compared to the control condition. Methodological limitations associated with te current study,individual student performance difference and procedures for using ORCR are described.