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Advances in Reading Intervention

Research to Practice to Research

The Extraordinary Brain Series, XIV

edited by

Carol McDonald Connor, Ph.D., Arizona State University and Peggy McCardle, Ph.D., M.P.H. Peggy McCardle Consulting, LLC

Contents

Part I Introduction

Chapter 1 Research to Practice to Research: The Importance of Reciprocity to Building Better Interventions Carol McDonald Connor and Peggy McCardle ... 3 Chapter 2 An Overview of Reading Intervention Research: Perspectives on Past Findings, Present Questions, and Future Needs Maureen W. Lovett ... 7

Part II Basic Considerations for Reading Intervention:

Behavior, Neurobiology, and Genetics ... 23

Chapter 3 The Growth of Self-Regulation in the Transition to School Frederick J. Morrison ... 25 Chapter 4 Innovative Data Summary Measures Provide Novel Insights on Reading Performance Christopher W. Bartlett, Andrew Yates, Judy F. Flax, and Linda M. Brzustowicz ... 37 Chapter 5 The Role of Rapid Automatized Naming in Reading Disruption: An Application of the Cusp Catastrophe Georgios Sideridis, George K. Georgiou, Panagiotis G. Simos, Angeliki Mouzaki, and Dimitrios Stamovlasis ... 49 Chapter 6 Eye-Movement Research in Reading: Enhancing Focus on the Development of Reading and Reading Disabilities Brett Miller ... 61 Chapter 7 Neurobiological Bases of Word Recognition and Reading Comprehension: Distinctions, Overlaps, and Implications for Instruction and Intervention Laurie E. Cutting, Stephen Kent Bailey, Laura A. Barquero, and Katherine Aboud ... 73 Chapter 8 Integrating Neurobiological Findings in Search of a Neurochemical "Signature" of Dyslexia Stephanie N. Del Tufo and Kenneth R. Pugh ... 85 Chapter 9 The Genetic Classroom: How Behavioral Genetics Can Inform Education Sara A. Hart ... 99

Integrative Summary 1: The Future of Reading Research: New Concepts and Tools and the Need for Detailed Genetic and Neurobiological Contexts Nadine Gaab ... 111

Part III Reading and Writing Interventions: Research to Inform Practice ... 117**

Chapter 10 What Practitioners Think and Want to Know Joan A. Mele-McCarthy ... 119 Chapter 11 Literacy in the Early Grades: Research to Practice to Research Carol McDonald Connor ... 129 Chapter 12 Addressing Dialect Variation in Early Reading Instruction for African American Children Nicole Patton Terry ... 143 Chapter 13 Reading Development Among English Learners Nonie K. Lesaux ... 155 Chapter 14 Students with Reading Difficulties Who Are English Learners Melodee A. Walker, Philip Capin, and Sharon Vaughn ... 167 Chapter 15 The Letra Program: A Web-Based Tutorial Model for Preparing Teachers to Improve Reading in Early Grades Juan E. Jiménez ... 181 Chapter 16 Struggling with Writing: The Challenges for Children with Dyslexia and Language Learning Difficulty When Learning to Write Vincent Connelly and Julie E. Dockrell ... 197 Chapter 17 Fostering the Capabilities that Build Writing Achievement Rui A. Alves and Teresa Limpo ... 209 Chapter 18 Effectiveness of a Beginning Reading Intervention: Compared with What? Examining the Counterfactual in Experimental Research Michael D. Coyne ... 221 Integrative Summary 2: Translating Reading Research into Effective Interventions for All Children Who Struggle with Reading Julie A. Washington ... 231

Part IV Finale: Looking to the Future ... 237**

Chapter 19 Innovation and Technology that Can Inform Reading Interventions David J. Jodoin ... 239 Chapter 20 Reading Intervention in Perspective Donald L. Compton and Laura M. Steacy ... 249 Chapter 21 Moving Forward in Reading Intervention Research and Practice Peggy McCardle and Carol McDonald Connor ... 261

About the Editors

Carol McDonald Connor, Ph.D.

Senior Learning Scientist, Learning Sciences Institute, P.O. Box 872111, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85278

Carol McDonald Connor is a professor of psychology at Arizona State University and a distinguished research associate at the Florida Center for Reading Research. Her research focuses on examining the links between young children’s language and their literacy development with the goal of illuminating reasons for the perplexing difficulties that children who are atypical and diverse learners have with developing basic and advanced literacy skills.

Peggy McCardle, Ph.D., M.P.H.

Owner, Peggy McCardle Consulting, LLC, 14465 86th Avenue, Seminole, Florida 33776

Peggy McCardle is a private consultant and an affiliated research scientist at Haskins Laboratories. She is the former chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), U.S. National Institutes of Health, where she also directed the Language, Bilingualism, and Biliteracy Research Program and developed various literacy initiatives.

An Overview of Reading Intervention Research

Perspectives on Past Findings, Present Questions, and Future Needs

Three decades of work in the relatively young science of reading intervention research have been productive, revealing many positive findings about how to intervene with children and adolescents who struggle to learn to read because of dyslexia, reading disabilities, or other causes. There appears to be compelling evidence that effective intervention for readers struggling with acquiring basic reading skills should include:

  1. Explicit, systematic, phonologically based instruction with ample opportunities for practice and cumulative review.
  2. Systematic instruction on all levels of written language structure, from subsyllabic and sublexical dimensions to different text and discourse structures.
  3. Instruction and scaffolded practice to promote the application and transfer of newly acquired skills to new materials.
  4. Modeling, teaching, and mentoring of specific reading, self-regulation, and self-monitoring strategies.
  5. An integration of decoding and spelling to stress the reciprocity of these activities.
  6. Daily attention to vocabulary growth and comprehension development using a variety of appealing and complex texts.

The amount of empirical evidence for these recommended ingredients of effective reading intervention decreases with list placement, although all can be considered to have good supporting evidence. There are also data to suggest that improvement in reading skills may continue, with long-term investments in instruction and effort, into adulthood but that the “gap” between struggling and typical readers is rarely if ever completely closed for more severe cases of dyslexia. Some residual symptoms of reading disability (RD) tend to persist into adulthood, even with strong literacy and educational outcomes (Bruck, 1992; Shaywitz et al., 1999).

We also know that early intervention for children at risk of reading-acquisition failure appears to be an excellent investment of time and resources, as it generally yields very positive outcomes (Denton et al., 2014; Foorman et al., 1998; Wanzek & Vaughn, 2007, 2008). Early intervention, with adequate infrastructure within the school and the availability of later “booster” interventions when needed, has been shown to be effective (Al Otaiba et al., 2014).

Adolescents and adults with limited reading skills, in contrast, are far more difficult to remediate (Vaughn & Fletcher, 2010; Vaughn et al., 2012) and require a far greater investment of resources over time. It is important to recognize, however, that it is not too late for the remediation of older readers if effective intervention is available, along with group support and the reader’s motivation to improve reading skills (Lovett et al., 2012)....

Conclusion

There is much to celebrate in the advances made in both research and practice regarding thoughtful well-designed interventions for RD and in the encouraging evidence that continued intervention for older, struggling readers can yield positive outcomes. The need for multifaceted reading interventions, with a firmer grounding in theory and evidence and more attention paid to instructional needs beyond the literacy-related ones, is obvious.