From the Editors

Dear Colleagues, This issue continues to tackle key issues in the field of literacy and note intricacies that add to our understandings and move the field forward. The first article, “Contributions of Executive Function and Cognitive Intrinsic Motivation to University Students’ Reading Comprehension” by Kelly B. Cartwright, Sherman A. Lee, Ana Taboada Barber, Laura U. DeWyngaert, Amanda B. Lane, and Terrain Singleton, engages in a deeper dive into some complexities involved in reading comprehension. In particular, the authors explore how factors such as executive functions (EFs) and motivation play a role in reading comprehension. What is unique about this analysis is that the authors consider what they call reading-specific EFs or grapho-phonological-semantic flexibility. Findings with university-level students “confirm unique contributions of cognitive intrinsic motivation and reading-specific EF to students’ reading comprehension beyond established predictors and domain-general EFs.” Hence, what this article shows is that beyond the usual supports of EF and motivation, reading-specific grapho-phonological-semantic flexibility matters both directly and indirectly beyond controls. Overall, this article indicates “the importance of applying knowledge of EF to specific reading processes to better support students who struggle to understand text.” Such findings have implications for instructional interventions that target skills and understandings related to EFs, particularly those that are reading-specific, and reading motivation as important ways to help improve reading comprehension. The authors were also able to demonstrate that the relations among these various components are more complicated than many persons currently believe. In the second article, “Reading Text When Studying in a Second Language: An Eye-Tracking Study,” Nicolas Dirix, Heleen Vander Beken, Ellen De Bruyne, Marc Brysbaert, and Wouter Duyck determine how readers’ goals relate to reading comprehension and also how these goals interact with second-language readers’ status. The authors collected eye movement data for 84 Dutch–English bilingual undergraduate students as they read informational texts in their first and second languages. The researchers divided the participants into two groups and asked them to read either for general understanding or for the purpose of taking a test. Results showed that the participants needed more time to prepare for testing than they did for general-purpose reading and also that they required more time to read in their second language (English) than in Dutch. Of interest is that the participants’ scores did not differ significantly in their two languages but that more time was needed to read in their second language. These results are important because they provide deeper understandings of second-language reading and how to support such readers. For “The Durable, Dynamic Nature of Genre and Science: A Purpose-Driven Typology of Science Trade Books,” Laura May, Thomas Crisp, Gary E. Bingham, Renée S. Schwartz, Mario T. Pickens, and Kate Woodbridge conducted a content analysis of children's and young adult literature focused on science. They wanted to know whether recommendations related to genre and its relation to learning science were valid. To do this, the authors examined the 400 National Science Teachers Association Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K–12 from 2010 to 2017. They rejected the idea that narrative texts, including biography and realistic fiction, are not useful aids for deeper scientific understandings. They present their framework for thinking about trade books that they claim “establishes two main content-based categories: lived lives of scientists and accepted knowledge.” Each of these categories includes multiple genres that strive to achieve different goals. The authors emphasize the importance of providing young people with more nuanced portraits of scientists so they recognize the human dimensions necessary to engage in scientific inquiry, including curiosity, questioning, and diversity of all types. This analysis deepens understanding of the texts used to build science knowledge and has implications for practice. In the fourth article, “Sound Stories: Using Nonverbal Sound Effects to Support English Word Learning in First-Grade Music Classrooms,” Jessica Lawson-Adams and David K. Dickinson consider an intriguing alternative for teaching first graders new words. Knowledge of language, in which vocabulary plays a highly visible role, is a widely recognized and demonstrated contributor to literacy and, most importantly, reading comprehension. In this study, the authors exploited the relation between sound effects and their verbal equivalents to teach students new vocabulary through an approach called sound stories. The authors found that first graders gained deeper understandings of words taught with this method than when taught without sound effects. Students used more gestures and provided more contextual information for vocabulary taught with sound stories. The authors point out and recommend that vocabulary instruction could and should be extended to contexts such as music class. Additionally, they suggest that sensory information such as sounds can and do add to word learning, which is an important extension of the vocabulary-learning literature. In “Question Asking During Reading Comprehension Instruction: A Corpus Study of How Question Type Influences the Linguistic Complexity of Primary School Students’ Responses,” Liam P. Blything, Andrew Hardie, and Kate Cain deepen understanding of the kinds of questions asked by teachers implementing guided reading instruction to 115 students in 20 small groups. The authors also wanted to know what effect lower and higher order questions had on students’ responses in terms of linguistic complexity. The authors examined over 40 hours of small-group reading instruction and found that teachers asked more low- than high-challenge questions but that they asked more high-challenge questions than had been previously reported. The researchers also found that higher challenge questions elicited more sophisticated language from students regardless of age and reading ability. Of particular interest, the teachers in the low-socioeconomic (SES) schools asked more high-challenge questions than teachers in the higher SES schools did. The authors attribute this finding to the fact that the teachers in the low-SES schools were more recent graduates than those in the high-SES schools. The researchers conclude that teacher understanding of questioning can lead to more active student engagement in critical practices necessary for comprehension. although there was no statistically significant direct effect of English HLLE on reading comprehension for emergent bilinguals, the constructs were indirectly associated through morphological awareness and vocabulary. That is, greater HLLE enhanced morphological awareness, which in turn increased vocabulary knowledge, which in turn contributed to improved reading comprehension. These findings are important because they demonstrate the complexity of the HLLE for emergent bilingual students and provide greater insight into how to reconcile some of the mismatches between school expectations and the ways that language and literacy are present in the lives of emergent bilingual young people. For the seventh article, “Automated Scoring of Students’ Use of Text Evidence in Writing,” Richard Correnti, Lindsay Clare Matsumura, Elaine Wang, Diane Litman, Zahra Rahimi, and Zahid Kisa sought to demonstrate the potential of providing educators with computerized feedback to student writing. More specifically, the researchers recognized that one of the principle barriers to helping students develop their analytic text-based writing skills was the labor-intensive process of reading and responding to students’ written work. The authors describe and report on automated essay scoring (AES) and its use in 65 fifth- and sixth-grade language arts classrooms, finding “close correspondence of human and AES scores, alignment of AES scores with components of instruction that the authors expected would predict variation in students’ writing quality, and association between AES scores and other expected measures of student achievement.” This work shows promise for helping intermediate-grade students become more critical readers and writers of informational texts. The last piece is an invited commentary titled “Propaganda in an Age of Algorithmic Personalization: Expanding Literacy Research and Practice.” Renee Hobbs critically examines the concept of algorithmic personalization, which “uses data from the behaviors, beliefs, interests, and emotions of the target audience to provide filtered digital content, targeted advertising, and differential product pricing to online users.” In other words, it is this practice that allows politicians and special and commercial interests to presciently pursue their target audience with almost supernatural insight into the deepest and most personal beliefs and understandings of self. The uptake is that awareness, practice, and recognition of algorithmic personalization ought to be part of what it means to be literate in today's increasingly complex world. We are excited to present this strong set of articles that inform theory, research, and practice in important ways. We hope you will find this issue enlightening, and we look forward to watching how these improved understandings impact the field.