From the Editors

Dear Colleagues, This issue is filled with strong articles that build on current literacy understandings in ways that make a difference to research and practice. Before discussing the issue's theme, we share some thoughts on our “Literacy and Human Rights” editorial and our dissemination projects and provide a general update. consistently emphasize the importance of resources and identity in building a literate community, so although basic needs are clearly a priority, we argue that so are books, teachers, learning centers, and writing materials, as well as a valuing of the languages, cultures, and stories of these individuals. This editorial is our effort to bring our community together to work toward change. We are working to get our research into the schools, classrooms, communities, and homes where literacy is being experienced. We are posting on RRQ's Facebook (https​://www.faceb​ook.com/group​s/15484​39441​91769​8/), and we are tweeting on Twitter (@DrGoodWin4Lit). Please join our conversations and share with your research and practice connections. Also, we share interviews with RRQ authors via podcasts (https​://sound​cloud.com/ilatoday) and Skype on YouTube (https​://www.youtu​be.com/playl​ist?list=PLPEk​vzXdK-8qnih​4Nx5O​J5XTe​xZsldc5T) and RRQ's website (https​://ila.onlin​elibr​ary.wiley.com/page/journ​al/19362​722/homep​age/rrqau​thori​nterv​iews), which we described in an International Literacy Association blog post (Formon, 2019). In this dissemination work, the authors clarify their study findings and connect them to practice. We encourage you to start listening, reading, and interacting as part of your daily activities, and we hope you will encourage your networks to do so as well. Good news! RRQ submissions are up by 21% from just a few years ago, with approximately 220 new submissions per year. With our efforts to provide two to four reviews for each submission, often across multiple review cycles, we want to thank our reviewers for their monumental efforts and ask for continued support and suggestions of reviewers with expertise to contribute. Authors and reviewers are what make RRQ the top-tier literacy journal in the field. We are excited to publish this group of articles because although they cover a broad spectrum of topics, they are united in their consideration of new layers related to well-established ideas in the field of literacy. In other words, each article adds an extra layer of understanding to a generally accepted idea. relational reasoning…is the ability to derive meaningful patterns [that]…can take one of four forms: analogy (similarity), anomaly (discrepancy), antinomy (exclusivity), and antithesis (opposition). These four forms would appear to have relevance to students’ ability to forge an association between the content of text and their personal knowledge and experiences. Hattan found that activating prior knowledge via relational reasoning was more effective than techniques more often used, such as K-W-L (know-want-learn), in which students mobilize their knowledge and bring everything that they know about a topic to mind. This novel technique gives the field a new way of thinking about activating prior knowledge. a new market has emerged to produce text solutions that provide multiple versions of the same texts that cover the same content across a range of different difficulty levels….However,…are the easier texts really easier in terms of challenges they present to readers’ comprehension? comprehension of the easy and challenging versions was similar for most students, but students in the K-W-L classrooms outperformed students in the Listen-Read-Discuss classrooms. Only a small subset of students who read significantly below average, many of whom were identified as English learners, benefited from reading the easier versions. In other words, the instructional activity was more supportive of reading comprehension than was the level of the text. This pushes on the generally accepted practice of primarily providing texts at students’ reading level to support their reading comprehension. The third article also takes on a well-accepted reading concept, here using sourcing to establish trustworthiness of texts, and identifies an effective way to teach sourcing that leads to transferable and sustainable effects. In “Teaching Sourcing in Upper Secondary School: A Comprehensive Sourcing Intervention With Follow-Up Data” by Ivar Bråten, Eva W. Brante, and Helge I. Strømsø, high-schoolers “were taught to take relevant source features into consideration when selecting textual resources; to predict, interpret, and evaluate content by means of source feature information when reading; and to include specific references to sources in their written task products.” Students were taught this using “a contrasting cases approach that juxtaposed adaptive sourcing with a lack of sourcing typically displayed by secondary school students.” In other words, students considered examples of different thinking of hypothetical students. The results indicate that even when completing a far-transfer assignment, students who had learned about sourcing this way valued sourcing more and showed more effort related to sourcing. This link to transfer is important because sourcing is a key need within everyday reading of digital content. students need to be taught that these two conditions necessitate different strategies, with more effort needed to develop a coherent mental model of a text when access to it is not granted when answering questions….If students do not practice working to develop mental models of texts, it is likely that when called on to do so, they will struggle. In the fifth article, “Oral Language Intervention in Norwegian Schools Serving Young Language-Minority Learners: A Randomized Trial,” Mia C. Heller, Arne Lervåg, and Vibeke Grøver also unravel an extra layer of a well-accepted idea in the field: the importance of oral language to literacy, especially for second-language learners. The additional layer tackled by this study involves exploring a way to bridge research to practice. The authors used a researcher–practitioner partnership because it gave them access to “the needs of practice.” Focused on building second-language oral language by teaching “school-relevant vocabulary and basic sentence production in addition to supporting extended talk,” the extra layer here shows how “the iterative process within the partnership may have helped in developing a program that was adaptable to the school setting, thus supporting both its usability and its ecological validity.” In other words, these researcher–practitioner partnerships show a lot of potential for eliciting research-based changes in classrooms. the large body of research on childhood dyslexia has contributed to a better understanding of poor reading in this group of children, which in turn has informed the design of effective reading interventions….It is equally important to implement and evaluate reading interventions to support deaf children's reading. Overall, we are excited about the layers of understanding that these studies add to the literature, and we look forward to their impact on theory, research, and practice. Amanda Goodwin Robert T. Jiménez