William Grabe’s research while affiliated with Northern Arizona University and other places

This review of teaching reading addresses three foundations for reading development: (a) reading research findings that provide insights into the construct of academic reading abilities, (b) the translation of research findings into a coherent set of curricular principles for reading instruction, and (c) a set of effective instructional practices that draw upon research findings and curricular principles. Research has shown the complexity of skilled reading which integrates a large number of specific linguistic skills and underlying cognitive skills. Two lines of research have major implications for reading instruction: The first centers on the powerful roles of vocabulary and syntax in second language (L2) reading development, and the second centers on the widespread affirmation among researchers that reading experience is the key to becoming a skilled reader. The amount of reading that L2 readers engage in serves as the primary explanation for their developing L2 vocabulary, syntax, fluency, and comprehension skills; amount of reading also supports a range of underlying cognitive abilities critical for reading development (background knowledge, motivation, inferencing, comprehension monitoring, goal setting, and self‐regulation, among others). The curricular principles, stemming from these findings as well as research into effective teaching, highlight concepts that drive effective reading instruction. The instructional practices recommended rely on both the research evidence reviewed and best practices among skilled educators.

Chapter 2: Building Blocks of Fluency and Comprehension. This chapter describes the many component skills and knowledge resources that contribute to reading fluency and reading comprehension. Key component skills addressed include word recognition, orthographic processing, letter-sound correspondences, sight word reading, morphological processing, phonological processing, spelling knowledge and orthographic mapping, syntactic processing, semantic processing, semantic proposition formation, working memory (central executive, phonological loop, episodic buffer), long-term memory, and cognitive executive functions. Other concepts introduced along with component skills include the self-teaching hypothesis, statistical learning, the alphabetic principle, implicit learning, connectionism, lexical access, automaticity, the Lexical Quality Hypothesis, spreading activation, priming effects, word-to-text integration, chunking, meta-linguistic awareness, good-enough parsing, now-or-never processing, chunk-and-pass processing, and usage-based approaches to language learning. The chapter closes with implications for instruction.

Chapter 9: Social Contexts of Reading. This chapter focuses on the many social contexts in which reading is carried out and in which reading develops. We learn to read within a family unit, in various school settings (and their associated goals, expectations, and opportunities), in various classrooms, and in interaction with specific teachers and student peers. Students are also influenced by the wider social and cultural expectations of political, religious, ethnic, economic, and social institutions. Social contexts set the stage for successful reading within the first year of life, and language knowledge, as well as beginning reading, is profoundly shaped in the first five years of life. L2 reading, as it often is learned in childhood or adolescence, is also strongly shaped by social contexts in which learning to read is carried out. Four specific issues include the needs for effective teacher training, the status of minority language instruction in K-12 schools, advanced L2 reading instruction, and most importantly, the role of language and reading exposure throughout a learner’s lifetime. The chapter concludes with implications for instruction.

Chapter 18: Extensive Reading. Extensive reading (ER) is understood here as an extensive amount of reading. It is not specifically tied only to enjoyable reading or easy reading, although both of these sources of reading are important. The fundamental idea is that a large amount of understandable input (i.e., within students’ linguistic competence) via reading will develop students’ language and knowledge resources through incidental implicit learning. The benefits of extensive reading emerge over time and is fundamental for developing advanced reading abilities. A large amount of reading (extensive reading) leads to better vocabulary knowledge, better background knowledge, and better reading comprehension. Research in both L1 and L2 of contexts are reviewed, and the role of extensive reading (L2) or amount of reading (L1) is the key foundation for reading development and advanced reading comprehension. The chapter concludes with implications for instruction.

Chapter 12: Building Main Idea Comprehension: Syntax and Strategies. Identifying main ideas from a text is the fundamental comprehension process that drives how we understand a text and use that information for whatever goals we have set as readers. Identifying main ideas from a text is the fundamental comprehension process that drives how we understand a text and use that information for whatever goals we have set as readers. Critical to main idea comprehension is word-to-text integration processing. This operates automatically through syntactic processing for skilled readers. Comprehension processes are supported through the functional information provided by syntactic resources. However, when texts are difficult or learners need additional support, strategies provide the bridging mechanism in learning to comprehend texts. Strategies that have shown to be effective in research studies are reviewed. The chapter concludes with implications for instruction.

Chapter 13: Becoming a Strategic Reader. This chapter focuses on the development of the strategic reader, rather than strategies themselves. Strategic readers automatically and routinely apply combinations of effective and appropriate strategies, depending on reader goals, reading tasks, texts being read, and strategic processing abilities. Strategic readers are also aware of their comprehension success in relation to reading goals and apply sets of strategies appropriately to enhance comprehension with difficult texts. Becoming a strategic reader is challenging and requires considerable instruction and support. The chapter reviews research involving several instructional approaches to develop strategic processing, including Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), Questioning the Author, Transactional Strategies Instruction (TSI), Promoting Adolescent Comprehension of Text (PACT), and Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI). The chapter then links strategic reading to the challenges of advanced “reading to learn” goals, and concludes with implications for instruction.

Chapter 3: Comprehension Processes. This chapter describes higher-level processes and how both lower- and higher-level processes work together to form a mental text representation and a situation model of reading. Key features of higher-level processing include the following: text representation, situation model processing skills associated with working memory, background knowledge, and executive function resources. Key concepts include passive resonance processing, bridging inferences, the now-or-never bottleneck, lexical processing, incremental item-based learning, Kintsch’s Construction-Integration model of reading, a two-level account of reading comprehension, genre variations in text processing, working memory as executive function, other executive functions, attentional processing, inferencing, metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness, strategy use, goal setting, and comprehension monitoring. The chapter concludes with implications for instruction.

Chapter 17: Reading Fluency, Reading Rate, and Comprehension. This chapter reviews research on the role of reading fluency on reading comprehension in both L1 and L2 contexts. Reading fluency is a complex topic in itself, sometimes seen as a component skill contributing to comprehension and sometimes viewed as a reading goal in itself. Reading fluency is defined according to multiple criteria: automaticity, rate, accuracy, and prosodic phrasing. Research on fluency also involves fluent word reading and fluent text passage reading. As research has demonstrated over decades, word reading fluency contributes to early reading development, but text passage reading is a strong predictor of later reading comprehension. This appears to be true in both L1 and L2 contexts. The chapter reviews the major research findings and concludes with implications for instruction.

Chapter 6: Explaining Reading Comprehension: Models of Reading. This chapter reviews the major current model of reading comprehension that underlie much of current research on reading comprehension, both in L1 and L2 contexts. The chapter quickly notes more metaphorical explanations and then moves on to models and frameworks that are key for interpreting reading comprehension research: the Simple View of Reading, the Construction-Integration Model, the Landscape Model, the Verbal Efficiency Model, and the Reading Systems Framework Approach. The chapter closes with a specific discussion of L2 reading comprehension as interpreted by current models, and finally with implications for instruction.

Chapter 11: Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension. This chapter highlights the central role that vocabulary knowledge plays in reading comprehension and reading development, for both L1 and L2 learners. The centrality of lexical knowledge for reading is supported now by decades of research across many L1 and L2 settings. In particular, the Lexical Quality Hypothesis, as the central concept of the Reading Systems Framework, is the main support for reading comprehension skills. This central idea applies to both L1 and L2 reading development. A further key idea argues that reading amount is the primary mechanism for the development of lexical quality, and by extension, reading abilities. Learning words in context is a complex notion that is developed in detail. Most important in this regard, is the major impact of incidental word learning from both extensive reading and background knowledge. The chapter closes with implications for instruction.