Equitable Foundational Literacy Research (EFLR)
We aim to unlock the great reader in every child. Specifically, our program will focus on increasing reading fluency and comprehension for all students, particularly Black, Latino, and Native American students and those experiencing poverty.
Reading Reimagined Equitable Foundational Literacy Research Awardees
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Project: Increasing Fluency in Middle School Students
Our objective is to improve fluency outcomes for Black, Latino, and Native American middle school students and those of all races experiencing poverty who strive to read on grade level by investigating a method of accelerating an evidence-based fluency intervention. The intervention consists of a simplified, standard protocol with instruction accessible for educators irrespective of particular expertise in teaching foundational literacy skills, while creating a space for students to participate as partners in the work. Our hypothesis is that the effective intervention strategy of Repeated Reading can be improved by directly supporting student agency and teacher capacity by addressing underlying reading skills. The Fluency Protocol we will investigate will add simple and scalable strategies around word recognition and language comprehension to Repeated Reading routines while supporting student engagement by cultivating a growth mindset and engaging with purpose and relevance for fluency learning.
Project STELLAR : Statistical (learning) and Translanguaging in Education: Leveraging Language Assets for Reading
Several leading theories of learning suggest promising directions for leveraging children’s home and community language assets to help them learn to read. Unfortunately, these insights are not always reflected in the curricula that children encounter in schools. This oversight is particularly important for African American children, many of whom are underrepresented culturally and linguistically in their classrooms. Their rich linguistic strengths are generally ignored, or worse, admonished when they approach the difficult task of mapping language onto text.
Project STELLAR aims to develop and evaluate a research-informed approach to teaching reading to African American English (AAE)-speaking children that integrates, honors and affirms their cultural-linguistic assets, improves their reading fluency, and by implication comprehension of text. We will accomplish this by leveraging children’s implicit knowledge of patterns that exist in language and text using a translanguaging approach.
Project: Read STOP Write: Development of a Multicomponent Intervention in Grades 4-5
The purpose of the Read STOP Write project is to develop, implement, refine, and evaluate the effects of a multicomponent intervention to improve fourth and fifth grade students’ foundational reading skills (word recognition, morphology, and fluency), reading comprehension, writing, and motivation for reading informational text. Instead of waiting for children to demonstrate mastery of foundational skills before introducing complex, informational texts, the Read STOP Write project will apply an innovative approach: providing children with the built-in supports they need to succeed during reading and writing of science and social studies texts. By teaching children to read multisyllabic words and build foundational skills in authentic learning activities, rather than in isolation, we hope to accelerate reading and writing acquisition while also supporting the development of children’s value of reading and their self-concept as readers. In addition, we plan to evaluate teachers’ and students’ perceptions of the social validity of Read STOP Write to inform iterative cycles of development, culminating in an experimental study of its effects on student achievement.
Project: BIG WORDS: Building Words + Making Meanings
This project will develop and evaluate materials that are contextually relevant and build competencies in multisyllabic decoding and encoding, while examining implications for targeted instruction of students who encounter challenges reading and spelling multisyllabic words in isolation and in authentic literacy contexts. The researchers will develop and evaluate the effects of an instructional intervention on Grade 3 to 5 students’ decoding, encoding, sentence production, fluency, and their confidence to read using small and whole group instructional practices. Small group instruction for decoding and encoding strategies addresses morphology and structural analysis of multisyllabic words with a goal of flexible application of syllabification practices. This flexibility and fluency in small-group contexts will be reinforced with brief whole-group applications. In this process, executive functioning is promoted as students reread and re-check their work. Students’ review and self-reflection will serve to reinforce the value of the taught strategy and to confirm the pragmatic and semantic functions of the word decoded and encoded in the context of reading and writing sentences. This project is based on principles of design research that allow for iterative cycles of implementation and revision.
