This document begins by providing four tips parents and care takers can use to supporting childrens' reading skills at home: (1) Have conversations before, during, and after reading together; (2) Help children learn how to break sentences into words and words into syllables; (3) Help children sound out words smoothly; and (4) Model reading…

Comprehension tests are often used interchangeably, suggesting an implicit assumption that they are all measuring the same thing. We examine the validity of this assumption by comparing some of the most popular reading comprehension measures used in research and clinical practice in the United States: the Gray Oral Reading Test (GORT), the two…

An ABAB withdrawal design was used to investigate the effects of explicit timing on accurate oral reading rate of sight word phrases of four elementary students demonstrating difficulty with reading. During baseline the students were exposed to flash cards with sight word phrases and asked to read them out loud and were not made aware that they…

The study examining the nature of misreadings of vowels by 10 good and 10 poor grade 3 readers of the Kannada language (which has a phonetically regular script) found that both groups misread vowels in equal proportion to their total number of misreadings. (DB)

The prevailing assumption underlying practice in the classroom is that children acquire most of their new words from context during silent reading. The trouble with learning from silent reading is that many pupils do not read widely or quickly enough. Reading aloud to children will, however, allow them to participate in activity that they all can…

Describes a 12-week peer tutoring reading program for primary students. Students showed significant reading gains when compared with a control group, but lost these gains when they returned to individual silent reading. Concludes that peer tutoring is an under-utilized but valuable teaching strategy. (Author/LS)

Four methods of monitoring oral reading rate progress were compared, with 48 elementary age students with learning disabilities. Although no significant differences were found among conditions, results suggest that self- or peer monitoring can be employed (with accuracy of measurement equal to that of teacher monitoring) as an efficient method of…

Shows how retelling stories appears to be a strategy to improve comprehension, concept of story and oral language. (EL)

Presents data on the impact of oral and silent reading on reading comprehension. Hypothesizes that reading comprehension is enhanced significantly by silent, rather than oral reading, and that re-reading is an effective mode for increasing comprehension in either mode. (EKN)

Suggestions from five contributors deal with the following topics: (1) helping the child who stutters to read fluently, (2) the vowel-consonant-vowel controversy, (3) motivating the reluctant reader, (4) building self-concept through a story wall, and (5) dictionary study. (FL)

Presents results of a study comparing self-correction rates among good and poor readers in a reading level design that controlled text difficulty. Reports no significant differences between the groups when reading identical passages at equivalent error rates. Concludes that self-correction rates correlate with reading accuracy but not…

Proposes adapting holistic scoring to oral retellings of stories as a means of developing students' concepts of interrelationships and their higher levels of comprehension. (FL)

This study examined the criterion-related validity of oral reading fluency (ORF), number of words read correctly per minute, with 64 regular, remedial, and special education elementary-level students. Comparison with two miscue-based assessment measures did not support modification of traditional ORF but did suggest practical value of selected…

Examines evidence on error rate in classroom tasks. Claims the usual interpretation of a negative relationship between error rate (especially in oral reading errors) and reading achievement as meaning that low error rates lead to reading growth may be mistaken. Suggests oral errors cause tension, which increases attention and instigates deeper…

The readings in this collection were prepared to accompany a report of a series of experiments conducted to determine what information readers, both skilled adults and children beginning to read, use when they read to understand a story. Titles of the readings are are (1) "Oral Reading: Does It Reflect Decoding or Comprehension?" (2)…