FROM THE EDITORS

Dear Colleagues, In this issue of Reading Research Quarterly, we present eight articles that examine a wide variety of topics and issues of concern to the literacy research community. First, we include the summary written by the recipient of the ILA Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan Outstanding Dissertation Award of 2020, John Z. Strong. In this piece, he shows how teaching intermediate-grade students to better understand text structure results in better comprehension and writing. From a bottom-up perspective, the article by Theresa A. Roberts, Patricia F. Vadasy, and Elizabeth A. Sanders examines one of the ways that young children most efficiently learn letters and their associated sounds. Two articles explore topics related to vocabulary. The first one, by Ernesto Guerra and Edmundo Kronmüller, looks at the role played by vocabulary knowledge in the pivotal role of making inferences and its subsequent effect on reading comprehension. The second article dealing with vocabulary, by Randy Lowell, Kaitlyn Wade Pender, and Katherine S. Binder, expands our understanding of the ways that readers acquire new vocabulary as they encounter new words in informative contexts. Authors Marc Stadtler, Lisa Scharrer, and Rainer Bromme examine the ways that readers resolve conflicting information across different texts. Their work provides insight into how to better support readers’ learning from text and how they might be helped to become more critical readers. Ricki Ginsberg and Wendy J. Glenn present interesting work on how to use young adult literature to teach adolescents to be more informed and understanding of those who are different from themselves. Likewise, David B. Wandera shows how Afrocentric methodology and indigenous epistemologies make possible better understandings of non-Western ways of knowing and learning from text. Finally, Ofelia García and Jo Anne Kleifgen present key tenets of translanguaging theory and show how it can be used to enable more informed understandings of emergent bilingual students and to design more equitable and, potentially, more effective forms of literacy instruction for students learning English. In the first article, Strong presents his dissertation summary, “Investigating a Text Structure Intervention for Reading and Writing in Grades 4 and 5.” He wanted to know how teaching text structure would affect fourth and fifth graders’ awareness of informational text structures, reading comprehension, and writing quality. He also wanted to know the ways that teachers would perceive the value of text structure instruction. His experimental research design included two instructional interventions: one focused on text structures and the other on reading comprehension strategies. He complemented this design with qualitative data collection focused on determining teachers’ perceptions of the value of teaching students to identify text structures and to subsequently make use of this information in their writing. After students identified different text structures using graphic organizers, they were asked to write summaries of the texts that employed them. Students in the text structure group outperformed those in the strategy instruction group. Teachers viewed both instructional interventions as socially valid, with significant goals, appropriate procedures, and important effects. Strong concludes that teaching text structures merits inclusion in literacy curricula and that it should be investigated further. For the second article, “Translanguaging and Literacies,” we invited García and Kleifgen to write about translanguaging and its potential for language and literacy research and instruction. The authors answer questions concerning what translanguaging is, what its theoretical underpinnings consist of, how it is useful for teachers and researchers, and how it can serve as a better explanatory framework for thinking about bi/multilingualism. The authors critique, and dismiss as inadequate, accounts of bilingualism and biliteracy that view these as separate or distinct from each other. Instead, García and Kleifgen trace how scholars’ thinking has shifted toward a more unitary and interconnected understanding of bi/multilingualism. The authors also emphasize that human beings are driven to communicate regardless of the named societal languages in their linguistic repertoires. García and Kleifgen review the literature on how translanguaging can be used for teaching literacy, and they provide descriptions of case studies that have demonstrated translanguaging’s potential for improving the language and literacy-learning outcomes of emergent bilingual students. The authors conclude by advocating for more equitable pedagogies that acknowledge, encourage, and integrate all of the language resources of minoritized students into language and literacy teaching. In the third article, “Preschool Instruction in Letter Names and Sounds: Does Contextualized or Decontextualized Instruction Matter?” Roberts, Vadasy, and Sanders investigate the differences between teaching letter names and sounds in isolation (decontextualized instruction) or in the context of storybook reading, on preschool children’s (contextualized instruction) early literacy learning and engagement during instruction. The authors point out that “learning letter names and sounds may appear to be simple but is in fact a difficult task for young children.” The researchers asked, “What is the influence of contextualized versus decontextualized instruction on alphabet knowledge and phonemic awareness? How does contextualization influence children’s engagement in instruction? Do treatment effects differ for DLL (dual-language learner) and non-DLL children?” After 10 weeks of instruction, children made statistically significant gains in both instructional conditions on all alphabet measures. Children in the decontextualized treatment made greater gains on letter sound identification of letters in isolation and on phonemic awareness. There were no differences between DLLs and non-DLLs in letter learning, phonemic awareness, or engagement. The authors encourage preschool teachers to present letter names and their sounds to students. Roberts, Vadasy, and Sanders’s instructional approach, paired-associate learning, provided ongoing opportunities for teaching alphabet knowledge via participatory activities and games using techniques that evoked active verbal responding. In the fourth article, “Moments of Pause: Understanding Students’ Shifting Perceptions During a Muslim Young Adult Literature Learning Experience,” Ginsberg and Glenn describe how English students in an urban and highly diverse high school in the United States read and discussed young adult texts centered on Muslim protagonists and the religion of Islam. The authors were interested in knowing whether such an experience could have an impact on students’ understanding of Islam and its adherents. Ginsberg and Glenn worked from the assumption that students can shift their understandings of people different from themselves by engaging with young adult literature. The researchers chose four young adult titles set in a variety of contexts across multiple time periods that students in the focal teacher’s classroom read over a period of 10 weeks. Accompanying the reading of the texts, students received instruction focused on key elements and cultural practices associated with Islam. The authors conclude that although students made progress in terms of empathy and understanding of Islam and its practitioners, they “regularly existed in a tenuous state within each moment of pause, a state defined simultaneously by forward momentum, stops and (re)starts, and confusion and clarity.” Through “thoughtfully constructed framing and activities…students demonstrated both an understanding of and a willingness to connect with the characters from a culture and faith different from their own.” Ginsberg and Glenn encourage teachers to consider the potential for helping adolescent students learn about people from distinct cultural backgrounds by reading and discussing young adult literature. Readers seemed to initially detect conflicts regardless of their topical relevance. However, readers for whom a conflict was relevant displayed increased regulatory effort: They spent more time on looking back to conflicting claims than did readers for whom the conflict was irrelevant. The researchers conclude that helping readers identify goals for their reading will improve both their understanding of textual information and their ability to recognize and address conflicting information. The sixth article, “Resisting Epistemic Blackout: Illustrating Afrocentric Methodology in a Kenyan Classroom,” is grounded in what Wandera calls “an interepistemic synergy approach,” which draws “from both Western(ized) epistemic conceptualizations and non-Western or indigenous epistemic conceptualizations.” His Afrocentric methodology involves “a body of approaches, rules, and postulates informed by an ontology of collective values founded on indigenous knowledge systems where relationships are important.” Data from interactions between seven grade 5 students and four grade 9 students are presented. The grade 9 students studied writing produced by grade 5 students, discussed with them ways to improve their writing, brainstormed ideas, and introduced them to some literary devices. The author concludes that language use by these students is a complex picture involving translingual practices. Students made use of some or all of the following languages as they developed their texts: Luo, Arabic, Gujarati, Somali, Kikuyu, some Maasai, Kalenjin, and Taita. Wandera recommends that literacy researchers should find ways to incorporate local indigenous understandings of language and literacy into their research designs and analyses. For the seventh article, “Adult Vocabulary Modulates Speed of Word Integration Into Preceding Text Across Sentence Boundaries: Evidence From Self-Paced Reading,” Guerra and Kronmüller wanted to know what skills help readers construct a rich and complex situation model of text. The authors hypothesized that the ability to create such a model depends on the quality of readers’ vocabulary knowledge. Guerra and Kronmüller specifically examined whether online inferences produced during reading are better predicted by overall reading comprehension or lexical knowledge. They directed participants to read short stories (pairs of sentences), which participants silently read word by word at their own pace. Findings showed that the best individual differences predictor was participants’ vocabulary knowledge, and no effects of working memory, decoding skills, or fluid intelligence were found on the integration of words across sentences. The researchers conclude that vocabulary instruction for adults could provide important benefits for overall reading comprehension and that further research is needed to determine the most effective ways to accomplish this result. For the last article, “Impact of Informative Context’s Meaning Consistency During Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition,” Lowell, Pender, and Binder wanted to know how readers learn new words depending on the consistency (or lack thereof) of the informative context found within their reading materials. The authors recognize that people know the meanings of many more words than they could have learned from instruction and that a great many words are mostly encountered only in print. In their study, Lowell, Pender, and Binder wanted to know how encountering new words within informative and consistent contexts would differ from exposure to the same words within inconsistent contexts, or different meanings for the same words. University students were asked to read text containing novel target words found within consistent or inconsistent contexts on two different occasions. The researchers found that more exposures to the target words led to better learning, both immediately after exposure and after a weeklong interval. Consistent contexts resulted in shorter reading times, but encountering a novel target word (e.g., klon) for the first time (as opposed to its known control word, cold) during the second reading session inflated the amount of time readers needed to complete the task. The authors conclude that readers should be encouraged to read widely to increase their exposure to unknown words. As is typical for each issue of Reading Research Quarterly, you see the final products of an incredibly labor-intensive process of thinking, knowledge of the field of literacy research, interaction and exchange of ideas among our community of scholars, and multiple iterations and revisions of each of the published articles, resulting in what we believe is highly useful information. We are grateful to all of the authors who submit their work to Reading Research Quarterly, to the International Literacy Association staff who support our efforts by organizing the necessary work and keeping us on schedule, and to all of the reviewers who very graciously donate their time and expertise to this task.