Parental involvement is seen as one of the most malleable factors of the student's home situation, which makes it a relevant subject for schools, educational policies, and research. Though many studies have researched its role in student achievement, effects are not univocal. It is difficult to tell whether these inconsistent results are caused by…

This book provides a holistic overview of what leads to success in foreign language learning at an early age and deepens our understanding of early foreign language learning. The studies use an array of methodological approaches to research learners aged between three and ten, as well as their parents and teachers, in instructional, minimal-input…

Understanding the origins of poor literacy and numeracy skills in adulthood and how to improve them is of major importance when society places a high premium on proficiency in these basic skills. This edited collection brings together the results of recent longitudinal studies that greatly extend our knowledge of what works in raising skill…

Intended for teachers, this book reports an assessment of reading achievement in the Irish schools of first year postprimary pupils. Chapters discuss background information, the research procedure, the survey findings, "backwardness" in reading, and the researcher's conclusions. The book concludes with an abstract that lists some of the…

The purpose of this book is to introduce the research on readability, defined here as reading ease. The first part of the book covers how people read. A series of national literacy surveys show that the average person in the U.S. and most other countries are adults of limited reading skills. For example, the average adult in the U.S. reads at the…

This monograph is based on research designed to (1) identify the vocabulary words introduced at each grade level by the basal reader series adopted by the Georgia Board of Education; (2) determine the extent of overlap among the books is the series; (3) compare these lists with other recognized word lists; and (4) generated a list of words for the…

Recent research on children learning to write, coming from a mix of disciplines (English education, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and rhetoric), is described in this volume. The introduction, by Marcia Farr, emphasizes how the research contributes to understanding (1) of research methodology and theoretical frameworks, and (2) of…

A study is presented which attempts to clarify the notion of communicative proficiency in a foreign language and which outlines an instructional model that incorporates the insights of the study. Communicative proficiency is defined as fluent mastery of the foreign language in different contexts. The definition was operationalized into discourse…

A longitudinal study of reading difficulties in schools in the county of Dunbarton, Scotland, was conducted in 1966. More than 1,500 children were tested after they had completed two years at school and were just over seven years of age. Important results included: about 15% of the children were without any independent reading skill, boys were…

The study described in this book was designed to create an overall picture of the type of student found at a school for educationally substandard army recruits in England, to establish the causes of the student's educational backwardness and relate these to linguistic performance, and to compare the effectiveness of the approaches and methods used…

Noting that children in literate societies all learn the sound-symbol relationships of their languages but that orthographies, sound-symbol relationships, and societal attitudes toward literacy differ, the essays in this book explore both the universal and the culturally constrained aspects of the process of learning to read. Following an…

A case study of a young boy's learning to read and write from the beginnings of literacy at age 5 up to age 11, after reading and writing have converged, is the focus of this book. The first part of the book, a description of his learning to write, discusses invented spelling, research about other young spellers and writers, the shift toward…

The details of a 6-year investigation entitled the Education Testing Service (ETS) Collaborative Research Project on Reading, which brought researchers and educators together in classroom studies of young children learning to read, are presented in this book. The first four chapters of the book describe the theoretical rationale, design, and…

Intended to provide a basis for a sociolinguistic theory of reading by placing reading within a discussion of the formal and functional characteristics of language use in social settings, this book explores the state of the art of reading and literacy, the relations between spoken and written language, and explanations of reading failure. Chapters…

The purpose of the research program described here was to investigate college students' approaches to learning, and to determine the extent to which these reflected the effects of teaching and assessment demands rather than representing relatively stable characteristics of the individual learners. There were six main areas within the program: (1)…