This volume presents approaches and strategies for integrating literacy acquisition into social studies content and processes, for deepening student understanding of the social sciences, and for motivating students to read and write in the social studies class. The book is intended to be a teachers' reference tool for planning creative and…

Focusing on activities that can be directly taught as "survival language situations," this journal (1) evaluates what school critics mean by "survival English," (2) demonstrates that teachers can easily pay attention to "survival"-oriented language, and (3) argues that a comprehensive English course enables students…

Designed for use by elementary school teachers, this newsletter issue contains activities to help children acquire reading skills while handling various types of reading materials. Following a description of the shared book experience, an approach to teaching reading that incorporates modelling, recreational reading, and instructional reading, the…

The Swedish Basic Skills in a Long Term Perspective research project, which is described in this paper, was prompted by the belief that only a long-term perspective could reveal significant changes in schools and society at large. The general purpose of the described project is to endeavor, in historical and societal terms, to elucidate and…

This document presents diagnostic and prescriptive techniques that will enable teachers to enhance secondary school students' learning through reading in content areas. Three terms used in the document are defined in Section I: "vocabulary skills" include word attack skills, sight word skills, and word meanings; "comprehension skills" are literal,…

This bulletin reports relevant research in the basic skills areas of reading, language arts, and listening that has been organized and interpreted for the administrator, supervisor, and classroom teacher. The various sections provide information in the following areas: indicators related to learning in school settings, including school, class,…

The three articles in this journal issue focus on the real meaning of competency in reading and writing. The first article, "Minimums and Optimums," argues against the establishment of minimum competency tests and for an increase in instructional time. "Placement Testing: The Objective Irrelevant," the second article, maintains that the…

The forces or pressures that have produced a concern for fundamental skills of literacy are briefly considered, and a number of related questions are raised about willingness and capabilities for dealing with the issues in a deliberative, systematic manner. A major premise is the belief that the back-to-basics movement can be understood best in…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 35 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) cloze procedure; (2) the monitoring and facilitation of reading growth; (3) the effect of immediate item feedback on the reliability and validity of verbal…

This document describes a literacy project in rural Ecuador using a modified version of Sylvia Ashton Warner's language experience approach. This method allows learners to approach written culture on their own terms by learning words important to their life, then transferring these works to sentences and stories. The approach reduces the rural…

This set of four newsletters contains articles to help adult basic education and literacy teachers connect research and practice. The following are among the articles included: "The Effects of Continuing Goal-Setting on Persistence in a Math Classroom" (Pamela Meader); "Do the Cognitive Skills of Dropouts Matter in the Labor…