The role of the teacher, specifically teacher craft, is central to engaging students in effective reading instruction. However, the science of reading has revealed that the content taught is also important to reading acquisition. Although the science of reading was aggregated some two decades ago to result in what became known as the five big…

Research has indicated that a large percentage of primary-grade students who struggle in reading have not achieved full competency in the foundational reading competencies (word recognition and fluency). In this article, the author argues that more intensive instruction of the foundational competencies is needed and proposes a simple lesson…

Holistic approaches to remedial reading can be effective in promoting the reading growth of poor readers. Learning to read is most effective when it occurs in a context of functional and meaningful literacy activity. In order to create such a context students need to be engaged with real texts in a search for meaning. Repeated readings, taped…

Noting the time parents can spend with their children in literacy activities is often limited, identifies and describes eight principles upon which the success of parent-child literacy efforts appear to hinge, such as (1) regular daily time, (2) purpose and motivation, and (3) real literacy activity. (NH)

Reviews field dependence/independence research as it relates to reading and reading instruction and draws implications for reading instruction. (FL)

A study examined adult readers' phrasing ability to determine (1) if passage difficulty was a salient variable in readers' sensitivity to phrase boundaries in reading; (2) if phrase sensitivity was an issue of concern for young adult readers; and (3) if difficulties in phrasing were due to an overabundant or an inadequate sensitivity to phrase…

As in processing oral speech, proficient reading involves "chunking" written texts into meaningful phrase units. Unlike oral speech, however, cues for segmenting the written text at the proper points are not clearly marked in the text. One method for helping readers identify and use phrase boundaries is to mark such boundaries in the…

Methods shown to be effective in helping less fluent readers develop fluency suggest a set of principles that teachers may find helpful in designing regular classroom activities for fluency development. These principles include: (1) repeated reading of one text or meeting target words repeatedly in a variety of texts; (2) teacher modeling of…

In order to test the efficacy of having college students read texts in which phrase boundaries are explicitly cued, the phrased text treatments were administered to 42 college students from 3 developmental reading courses in one southeastern university. An experimental group was given the phrased texts, while a control group was given the…