From the Editors

Dear Colleagues, Articles in this issue of Reading Research Quarterly cross national boundaries, traverse historical time periods, posit new ways to frame digital literacy, and consider questions involving language, class, and race. As the editors, we believe that the diversity of the contexts, readers, and foci of these investigations has the potential to more fully explain how language and literacy influence each other and also how we might better leverage these findings to provide more equitable access to literate practices that benefit students and their communities. In essence, several of the articles unravel the ways that orthography influences readers and their comprehension. Other articles push back on accepted ideas. Below, we describe how each article in this issue adds understanding. We start with considering orthography in the first two articles: first, Portuguese, which is a language that employs an orthography of intermediate depth (i.e., semitransparent), and then, Chinese, which primarily uses a logosyllabic script. In the first article, “Cross-Lagged Relations Among Linguistic Skills in European Portuguese: A Longitudinal Study,” Sandra Santos, Irene Cadime, Fernanda Leopoldina Viana, and Iolanda Ribeiro investigate the directional influence of word-reading, listening comprehension, and oral-reading performance on reading comprehension for European Portuguese readers in grades 2–4. Findings indicate that oral reading fluency played a larger role in reading comprehension than did isolated word reading. This finding contrasts with what is known concerning less transparent orthographies such as English. Studies like these extend knowledge of how reading comprehension develops across orthographies of different depths, which contributes to better specified theoretical models of comprehension. The second article moves to considering reading in Chinese. In “Multiple Pathways by Which Compounding Morphological Awareness Is Related to Reading Comprehension: Evidence From Chinese Second Graders,” Young-Suk Grace Kim, Qian Guo, Yan Liu, Yan Peng, and Li Yang look at the ways that morphological awareness makes a contribution to reading comprehension for Chinese-speaking beginning readers. This focus on morphology reflects the nature of the orthography where morphemes are conveyed more transparently via Chinese characters than in the English writing system; hence, compounding morphological awareness (i.e., the ability to add together the meanings of morphemes such as those found in the word lighthouse) may be particularly important in Chinese reading. The authors found that morphological awareness both directly and indirectly influenced reading comprehension. This consideration of the unique affordances of Chinese characters, as opposed to those in syllabic or alphabetic writing systems, provides additional understandings of how readers make sense of a character-based writing system. Next, we turn to considering the access that children from low-income, ethnic-minority families in the United States have to books and the consequences of this access, in “Children’s Literacy Experiences in Low-Income Families: The Content of Books Matters.” Rufan Luo, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, and Alan L. Mendelsohn found that children had more access to concept books than they did to narrative books and that this access had effects on children’s production of language. Children in the sample had more access to books than one might expect, and that experience with different types of books was influential on children’s language production. These ways involved referential (e.g., “That’s a tree”) and storytelling abilities (e.g., talk about characters and their behavior). The authors call for more research that “go[es] beyond book-sharing activities and build[s] on the strengths of culture-specific language and literacy practices, such as oral storytelling, language brokering, and music literacy practices.” They also call for increasing children’s access to a wide variety of books. This work deepens understanding of how accepted ways of thinking influence access and uptake of literacy practices within families. It also shows one of the ways that written language influences oral language abilities. The next article, “Using a Digital Spelling Game for Promoting Alphabetic Knowledge of Preschoolers: The Contribution of Auditory and Visual Supports,” explores supports for learning within a gaming environment specifically designed for preschoolers. Adi Elimelech and Dorit Aram developed the digital spelling game to help young Hebrew-speaking children learn more about the writing system used for their language. The authors wanted to know if a digital spelling game could improve preschoolers’ scores on tasks such as letter naming. They also wanted to know about the effectiveness of auditory and visual supports, in combination and isolation, for promoting these children’s early literacy. Elimelech and Aram found that auditory supports were more important than visual supports with respect to the Hebrew language and writing system. Because children who used the game learned more about spelling in Hebrew, the authors recommend that games like this be provided to preschool-age children. This work provides evidence that children’s literacy learning can be enhanced without continuous adult direction. The fifth article invokes a historical lens to deepen understandings of literacy. In “What a Genealogical Analysis of Nila Banton Smith’s American Reading Instruction Reveals About the Present Through the Past,” James V. Hoffman and Donna E. Alvermann make use of one of Foucault’s ideas, genealogical analysis, to examine and think about the impact that Smith’s book American Reading Instruction has had on the field of literacy research and instruction in the United States. The authors illuminate the role of the International Reading Association (now the International Literacy Association), textbook publishers, and political forces in directing, influencing, and determining U.S. reading instruction as we now know it. The authors call for more and better historical literacy research that disrupts taken-for-granted notions of literacy teaching and learning. Their work challenges the larger narrative of continuous, upward progress in terms of methods and materials. This work also helps contextualize and explain how our field became what it now is, and shines a light on how our thinking and practices have changed over time. Next, the sixth article emphasizes issues of power. Catherine F. Compton-Lilly, Rebecca L. Rogers, and Tisha Lewis Ellison, in “A Meta-Ethnography of Family Literacy Scholarship: Ways With Metaphors and Silence,” examine the metaphors found in family literacy research studies for the purpose of identifying their conceptual frameworks. The authors argue that the metaphors we use in our speech and writing reveal important facets of “ideological stances and accompanying claims of legitimacy, power, and privilege.” They conclude that there is “an enduring silence related to racism, privilege, and injustice across highly cited studies [in family literacy research],” and call for more research “focused on family literacy practices that challenge systemic privilege and oppression.” Adherents of critical theory have long recognized that marginalization grounded in race, class, ability, and gender results in disparate academic outcomes. These occur, however, because of oppression, not due to any inherent characteristics of those involved. The work of these authors helps make this case more visible and, hopefully, amenable to change. The next article moves to considering digital reading. Kristen Hawley Turner, Troy Hicks, and Lauren Zucker present “Connected Reading: A Framework for Understanding How Adolescents Encounter, Evaluate, and Engage With Texts in the Digital Age” to provide data on how adolescents use the internet. The authors propose a model of print and digital text-reading comprehension that they call connected reading. They stress that young people now read both traditional print and digital texts and that these activities connect them to larger communities of readers and writers. The model of connected reading features the elements of recursion (engaging with and evaluating print and media), social connections (networks of readers), and a both/and mind-set (print and digital media). The authors recommend several instructional strategies for youth that include managing their digital devices, their distractions, and their social connections. Because this work is grounded in the reported practices of adolescent readers, it is able to flesh out some of the new demands and challenges facing literacy research and instructional practice. In the final article, Dongbo Zhang and Sihui Ke put the simple view of reading to the test in “The Simple View of Reading Made Complex by Morphological Decoding Fluency in Bilingual Fourth-Grade Readers of English.” Zhang and Ke conducted their work in Singapore with three groups of grade 4 readers: ethnic Chinese students who used English as their preferred language at home (Chinese EL1), ethnic Chinese students whose dominant language was Chinese but who were learning English (Chinese EL2), and ethnic Malay students whose dominant language was Malay and who were also learning English (Malay EL2). The authors wanted to know how morphological decoding might play a role in the simple view of reading for EL2 readers with different language backgrounds as compared with EL1 readers. Findings showed that “oral vocabulary was consistently a unique, statistically significant predictor of reading comprehension; morphological decoding fluency surfaced as a unique, statistically significant predictor in the Chinese EL1 and Malay EL2 groups but not the Chinese EL2 group.” The authors attribute these differences to both the English proficiency of the participants and the influence of their dominant language. Zhang and Ke explain their finding that morphological decoding fluency was a unique, statistically significant predictor for the Malay EL2 readers by pointing out that derivation is a major method of word formation in Malay but not Chinese. This work highlights the importance of morphological decoding abilities and also shows how linguistic diversity can provide resources for this important process and that these resources depend on the nature of the orthographies involved. We hope you enjoy these articles and the “different conceptions of literacy studied through different research traditions, because it is only via this broad conceptualization that we will truly deepen understandings and build equity” (Goodwin & Jiménez, 2019, p. 10).