Francine R. Johnston

Francine R. Johnston, EdD, is a literacy educator and former faculty member in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she taught courses in reading and language arts and coordinated the Reading Master’s Program until her retirement in 2012. Before entering higher education, she taught first grade and worked as a school reading specialist for 12 years, experiences that shaped her focus on how children learn to read and spell. At UNC Greensboro she also directed a reading clinic for struggling readers and supervised graduate work in reading education.

Johnston is a coauthor and illustrator of the influential Words Their Way word study series for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction, and has published research on early literacy, including “The reader, the text, and the task: Learning words in first grade” in The Reading Teacher. She is a coauthor of Book Buddies: A Tutoring Framework for Struggling Readers, which provides a structured, research-based model for one-on-one tutoring with students in grades K–3. She continues to consult with schools and districts on word study and reading intervention practices.