To explore how instruction in questioning can enhance teachers' use of questions that promote comprehension and how teachers' instruction of students in such strategies can enhance their ability to comprehend content area texts independently, this paper looks at prereading, during-reading, and postreading questioning activities. The first major…

Focusing on trends in reading achievement during the period from l970 to l984, this report draws from national assessments that involved more than 250,000 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. The first chapter (1) provides an overview of the report; (2) summarizes recent achievements documented by the…

Reading is a multileveled, interactive, and hypothesis-generating process in which readers construct a meaningful representation of text by using their knowledge of the world and of language. Reviewing research on the reading process, it is clear that context, script (a form of general event representation derived from and applied to social…

A research project was conducted to see if students given direct instruction in recognizing and asking literal, interpretive, and critical questions would ask better questions about material they read than students who were not given the same instruction. This premise, based on an extensive search of the literature on questioning and…

This volume consists of 10 papers dealing with issues, research and research findings regarding the effects of television advertising on children. The first paper critically examines recent research literature which bears on policy questions related to the effects of television advertising on children. Findings from a study designed to examine…

Successive studies conducted in Sweden have shown that linguistic awareness is an important prerequisite of learning to read. In one survey that measured the various aspects of the linguistic awareness of 6-year-old children, a very close connection was found between preschool linguistic awareness and reading proficiency in school. Another study…

The many studies comparing good and poor readers have yielded few conclusive findings as a result of a number of problems. The first set of problems has to do with the choice of tests or tasks. There are many differences in the cognitive demands of reading and listening tasks children encounter in school. In listening, prosodic cues facilitate…

In presenting a historical overview of trends in vocabulary research, this paper emphasizes the importance of word knowledge as a critical component in reading comprehension. It describes research examining current psychological and pedagogical models as they relate to vocabulary knowledge, and explores vocabulary research in the area of specific…

The "back to basics" movement raises questions regarding the nature of reading that is assumed in instruction and testing. Of the three definitions of reading (decoding, meaning-from-page, and intellectual processes) the latter view, which sees reading as a broad range of perceptual, associative, and cognitive elements, is preferred. The…

Approaches that appear most effective for teaching beginning reading to children who are having difficulty learning to read are discussed in this paper. Research indicates that a code-emphasis method produces the best results. To determine which type of code instruction is most appropriate, reading programs were analyzed in terms of content,…

The document reviews research data, particularly group research, relating to teaching reading to the mildly retarded child. The paper examines the following areas: word recognition/meaning (context, decoding/phonics, sight words); letter acquisition and discrimination; comparative studies of methods and techniques; reading profiles of retarded…

Reviews the literature on classroom reading instruction and elaborates the results of a series of studies that hypothesized that high-risk students, such as those typically found in low reading groups, would become more aware of how to reason during reading if their teachers explained the mental acts associated with strategic skill use. (NKA)

Describes the fundamentals of reader response theory, focuses on the aspects most relevant to reading instruction, and presents a method of teaching using reader response as a vehicle for improving student ability to learn from text. (NKA)

This executive summary discusses our current understanding of the difficulties that children with reading/learning disabilities encounter as they start down the road to reading and summarizes research on early identification and intervention. The focus is on children in kindergarten through second grade. Findings from the analysis indicate: (1)…

Although traditional indigenous stories are widely recognized for their artistic merits and their role in the linguistic and cultural continuity of indigenous peoples, they are seldom used in schools. This paper discusses the instructional uses of traditional coyote stories, with particular reference to bilingual revitalization programs involving…