The reading program of the Reading Public Schools encompasses skills which facilitate reading a wide variety of materials, reading as a source of enjoyment, and reading as a lifelong activity. The goals for each student address word recognition skills, comprehension, reading skills needed to function in society, reading skills for individual…

This final evaluation report of the Burrillville Reading Observes Necessary Communication Objectives and Skills (BRONCOS) project, a Right to Read program in Burrillville, Rhode Island, summarizes the results for each of the project's four general and ten specific objectives and describes the activities that have been carried out to accomplish…

Based on information from the report, "Becoming a Nation of Readers," this article presents eight recommendations for parents to follow to provide encouragement to their children in reading. (MD)

Questions if various methods of Recreational Reading would affect the reading attitudes of students who are identified as learning disabled. Finds that the following methods were both motivating and enjoyable for the student: self-sustained silent reading, book talk by teacher, books on tape, partner read when students selected their own partner,…

Describes a collegewide reading project which involved the whole community with activities centered on novelist Kurt Vonnegut's "Galapagos." (MG)

Examines reading anxieties (and test anxieties) of students in two developmental college reading courses. Finds that group and individual anxiety reduction methods made a significant difference in the reading performance and attitudes of the adult basic education students. (RS)

Describes Accelerated Reader (AR), a computer software program that promotes reading; discusses AR hardware requirements; explains how it is used for book selection and testing in schools; assesses the program's strengths and weaknesses; and describes how Grant and Madison Elementary Schools (Muscatine, Iowa) have used the program effectively.…

Examines preservice teachers' definitions of reading at the beginning and end of an introductory methods course in English language arts. Finds that, at the beginning of the course, 85% of the preservice teachers characterized the process of reading as a decoding task, while only 42% maintained that characterization by the end of the course. (RS)

Describes how preservice teachers in a content area reading course experience an assignment involving reading regularly outside their required reading and reflecting about it in writing. Shows how they came to understand science as a discipline that is engaging and provocative; and designed reading assignments that resembled the collaboration,…

Looks critically at the theoretical and ideological underpinnings of the practice of story mapping. Discovers a deep contradiction between the author's definition of reading as a constructive process and the reductionist nature of story mapping, which inhibits students' potential to explore a diverse range of personal responses by promoting…

Argues that learning to investigate students' language holds great promise as an avenue of assessment. Shows what the stories of three second-grade students reveal about their beliefs regarding both reading and language growth. Discusses how students define for themselves who readers are and what readers can do. (SR)

Finds that the 35 middle-school language-arts teachers studied agreed that Self Selected Reading (SSR) is an important way to improve students' reading attitudes and achievement, but that their schools rarely provided funds for buying student-preferred materials, and that finding time for SSR was difficult because of the pressure to prepare for…

Explores how social constructions of gender, race, and class were evident in three adolescent boys' literacy practices. Suggests each boy enacted his literacies in different ways, suited to his own subjectivities, rather than using traditional male hegemonies. Concludes that considering individuals' enactments of gender, race, and class may be…

Argues, based on ethnographic data, that students use their literacy practices to form their identities within, and sometimes in opposition to, the figured worlds of school, work and family. Concludes that many students look to school to provide formal literacy experiences, but find their reading and writing passions at odds with the demands of…

This article presents the results of qualitative research into how middle school students experience school reading. Students from grades 4 through 8 from four different schools were asked individually to draw and then to talk about specific times of their choice when they were and were not engaged in learning. The combined method of drawing and…