Recent efforts to motivate parents' involvement in their child's literacy development involve informing parents about how to incorporate literacy development into daily routines. Teacher leadership and communication are critical--the more teachers encourage and assist parents and caregivers in supporting their child's literacy development, the…

There have been multiple reports over the last 3 decades that stimulus quality and word frequency have additive effects on the time to make a lexical decision. However, it is surprising that there is only 1 published report to date that has investigated the joint effects of these two factors in the context of reading aloud, and the outcome of that…

Background/Context: Although much research has evaluated children's books for depictions of gender, little has centered on the portrayal of immigrants and social class. This investigation utilizes Bourdieu's theory of capital reproduction in education, Durkheim's conception of collective conscience and morals, and Bowles and Gintis's critique of…

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…

Acoustic phonatory events were identified in 14 women diagnosed with adductor spasmodic dysphonia (ADSD), a focal laryngeal dystonia that disturbs phonatory function, and compared with those of 14 age-matched women with no vocal dysfunction. Findings indicated ADSD subjects produced more aberrant acoustic events than controls during tasks of…

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…

Twenty-two children (ages 6-10) with Down syndrome were tested for receptive language, cognitive function, oral reading, and phonological awareness. Re-assessment 9 months later found better oral reading was associated with superior phoneme segmentation skills. Also, early segmentation ability appeared to predict later nonword reading, but not the…

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)

This study assessed the effects of curriculum on technical features (criterion validity and developmental growth rates) within curriculum-based measurement in reading with 91 elementary level handicapped and nonhandicapped students. Correlations between oral reading samples and reading comprehension as well as developmental growth rates were…

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…

Divided into poor readers and good readers, 144 Swedish students (13-14 years old) participated in an experiment in which oral reading speed, free recall, and summarization of narrative stories presented on videotex were studied as a function of reading skill, text structure, and physical factors. Good readers outperformed poor readers. (BRR)

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…

Designed to analyze systematically the relative effects of different types of oral reading errors on comprehension, this instrument consists of a basic set (each with an easy and a hard version) of six stories. Every story is transformed so that it contains simulated errors of a particular type: (1) correct, (2) semantically related visually…

Suggests that inner speech is a manifestation of the need to prestructure oral utterances. Among the results, inner speech was found to be acquired by normally developing readers between the ages of 8 and 11, and children comprehended text better when certain prosodic features were made visible on the text. (Author/CB)

Investigated children's use of context to facilitate word recognition and comprehension-monitoring processes in oral reading of connected prose as a function of grade level and decoding skill. Found no overall contextual facilitation of word recognition accuracy; however, less skilled decoders were helped by context in decoding some content words.…