Omer Ari

Reading interventions
Psycholinguistics (Cognitive processes of reading)

Omer Ari is a clinical assistant professor in the College of Education & Human Development’s Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education. He holds a master’s in Applied Linguistics/ESL and a doctorate in Reading, Language and Literacy Education, both from Georgia State University. For his dissertation research, he designed reading fluency interventions for struggling college readers and examined the effects of these interventions on various cognitive processes including the ability to construct coherent mental models from narrative passages. After completing his doctoral work at Georgia State, Ari worked with young struggling readers at Appalachian State University’s (ASU) renowned Reading Clinic while teaching courses on the foundations of literacy and psychological processes of reading as a clinical instructor at ASU’s Reading Education and Special Education Department.

Most recently, he has worked at Bloomsburg University’s (BU) Department of Developmental Instruction as an assistant professor. At BU, Ari developed strategies for struggling college readers in order to help them increase their reading fluency, their ability to learn unfamiliar content found in their textbooks, and their disposition to process information metacognitively through execution of higher levels of thinking. At BU, he also redesigned the developmental reading education curriculum around the goals of developing reading fluency skills, disciplinary literacy, and integrated reading-writing and language skills through project/inquiry based learning experiences.

His major research interests include cognitive processes of reading and ways to increase the efficiency of this process in struggling readers. As part of this research agenda, he has designed measures of differential exposure to print, examined the utility of various reading assessments with readers, and designed reading fluency interventions using instructional components that have been found effective in the literature.