Describes an education program designed to improve the literacy of Australian students from non-English speaking migrant backgrounds and to increase their knowledge of Australian history. (HTH)

This book presents practical ideas, procedures, and activities which can help parents improve children's reading. The book contains the following chapters: (1) "Reading and Your Child"; (2) "Living with and Helping Your Child"; (3) "Getting Ready to Teach Your Child"; (4) "The Teaching Session"; (5)…

Children's mastery of reading skills would be facilitated if reading programs capitalized on children's already-developed oral language competence. Barriers against "reading for meaning" exist when the cues used for predicting in oral language are not present in the written language which confronts children; yet anaylses of four reading…

Offers suggestions for improving beginning teachers' abilities to teach reading, noting the need for greater cooperation between colleges and practicing schools in providing teachers with the proper training in subject matter and teaching skills. Discusses teacher-developed reading and readiness programs, attitudes, and material selection. (FL)

Error frequency and language competence of bilingual grade 6 students were analyzed to determine the effect of language comprehension in errors made in solving mathematical word problems. Results provide support for the linkage of comprehension errors to measures of language competency. (29 references) (MDH)

Examined masked-form priming in groups of developing and skilled readers (elementary students and adults). In a lexical decision task, children showed significantly greater priming than adults for high N (neighborhood-size) words. A gradual attenuation across age was not found. The results suggest that the adaptation to lexical density may not…

In Western Australia there is a relatively small number of students whose behaviour is so severe that they are precluded from participating in regular schools. One alternative education placement for these students has been to enrol them in the Schools of Isolated and Distance Education (SIDE) program. This research reviews the enrolment of…

The first volume in this two-volume report outlines the nine educational principles on which the competence statements for adult reading and writing are based. The four literacies--for self-expression, practical purposes, knowledge, and public debate--are defined and some representative text types and common genres are provided. The four levels…

Because the teacher librarian has an important educational role to play in assisting students to become independent learners by applying the inquiry process to library research, this booklet has been designed to assist teacher librarians in teaching students the information skills appropriate to stage three of the inquiry process, i.e., analyzing…

Examines the word-reading strategies of a sample of second- and third-grade students in normal classrooms, focusing on the students' relative reliance on decoding versus sight-word associations. Suggests that lack of efficient decoding skills will begin to take a toll on reading comprehension by grade 3. (SR)

Individual differences in measures of prereading skills and in questionnaire measures of 4-5-year-old twins' print environments in Australia, Scandinavia, and the United States were explored with a behavioral-genetic design. Modest phenotypic correlations were found between environmental measures and the twins' print knowledge, general verbal…

Globalisation has placed a growing importance on English language speaking and listening. Prior research indicates that many international students from Asia, studying in Australia, face serious learning difficulties and lack confidence in speaking and taking a proactive role in classrooms. The paper reports on data gathered in interviews with…

This publication reports the results of an Australia-wide investigation of the literacy and numeracy skill attainment of children aged 10 and 14. The chapters present an overview and summary of the study and discuss children in special schools and special classes, the use of the mastery approach in the investigation, the mastery of reading and…

This study investigated the relationship of phonological awareness to learning to read. Australian first-grade children were tested for verbal intelligence, phonemic segmentation ability, and reading achievement. Path analysis revealed phonological awareness affected reading comprehension indirectly through phonological recoding. The development…

In 2000, Australia took part in the inaugural OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Approximately 500 Australian Indigenous students were assessed in PISA, providing a representative sample of the 15-year-old Indigenous population. This report presents the analysis of…