ABSTRACT
Educational research often cites the late 20th century as “The Age of Handbooks.” Educational handbooks of all sorts appeared, such as The International Handbook of Educational Research (Keeves & Watanabe, 2003); The Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education (Banks & Banks, 2001); The Handbook of Research on Teaching (Richardson, 2001); The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (Doughty & Long, 2003); The Handbook of Reading Research Volume, I (Pearson, Barr, Kamil, & Mosenthal, 1984), Volume II (Barr, Kamil, Mosenthal, & Pearson, 1991), and Volume III (Kamil, Mosenthal, Pearson, & Barr, 2000). In 2003, Blackwell Publishing listed 17 handbooks in its catalogue alone. This ironic and fundamentally valid “Age of Handbooks” observation refers to an attempt to gather most of the key information generated by a field, placing it into a handy, affordable package so that access is convenient and available to many, not just a few. This description sounds a bit like an academic version of a Walmart-one-stop academic shopping for almost anything. Yet, to be less sardonic, a handbook is a tool and any good handbook permits the reader to reference pertinent and current knowledge, and, perhaps more importantly, to access information considered to be of value by the cognizant academic community. Coterminous with the Handbook Age was the Meta-analysis Era. The late 20th and early 21st centuries witnessed a trend in American education and elsewhere toward mammoth research reviews and syntheses. The most influential of these for Understanding Advanced SecondLanguage Reading was the Report of the National Reading Panel (NRP) (NICHD, 2000) that reviewed and synthesized thousands of research studies published on children and pre-adults learning to read. A related undertaking, the Report of the National Literacy Panel (August & Shanahan, 2006), which focused on language minority children and adolescents, also reviewed and analyzed studies. These important taxpayer-funded national panels were not charged with the development of a theory of reading or with capturing the cognitive and metacognitive essences of the reading process for children and adolescents in either first or second languages but, rather, were charged with screening the research literature on reading in order to seek best practices for instruction and teacher preparation. They, nevertheless, took center stage on establishing what
work is important, which variables count, and how interpretations of work examined holistically should be constructed.
