A study is reported of the language behavior of trilingual 9-to-12-year-old native Italian speakers in Montreal, some of whom were studying Italian on Saturdays and some of whom were not. The study focused on their available vocabulary in the three languages (Italian, French, and English) and on their language productivity during their various…

Volume 1 of the final report of Project FAST consists of reports on 13 experiments concerning: (1) the application of associative learning strategies to the development of a basic sight vocabulary among mentally retarded children and adults, and (2) the development of text reduction techniques designed to facilitate comprehension and recall of…

Discusses large corpus and pedagogical word lists. Develops two word lists based on 80 compositions of second-, fifth-, eighth-, and eleventh-grade students from a metropolitan school district in western United States. Compares both favorably to the Dolch list. Notes remaining need to investigate vocabulary of individual beginning reading texts.…

Summarizes five studies: (1) new sight words for computer-using children; (2) immediate rewards for correct answers with computer assisted instruction; (3) importance of parental attitude and experience to student achievement with computers; (4) Logo and adolescent females' mathematics achievement; and (5) competition versus cooperation for male…

Investigates differences in performance on a task involving judgments of word-likeness between a group of reading-disabled children and normal readers matched to them either in reading level or age. Shows that although the knowledge of orthographic structure of reading-disabled children matches that of younger normal readers, reading-disabled…

A multiple-probe design across behaviors assessed the effectiveness of a simultaneous prompting procedure in teaching expressive identification of photos of community signs to two elementary students with moderate intellectual disabilities in a small group instructional arrangement. The procedure was effective in teaching both students the…

Three students (ages 17, 19, and 21) with moderate disabilities were taught to read and match-to-sample sight words comprising 4 4-member stimulus sets. Student performance indicated that symmetric relations emerged before one-node transitive relations and that one-node transitive relations emerged before two-node transitive relations. Results…

This study evaluated a cross-age peer tutoring intervention using four low-achieving grade-four students as tutors and three grade-three students reading at grade level. Tutors and tutees all improved their sight word performance substantially. All participants reported they liked the program and tutors also improved in self-concept. (DB)

This paper explores the use of sight word lists in the instruction of students with disabilities. A survey of 25 restaurants in a Midwestern U.S. city was conducted to examine the validity and efficacy of two widely accepted public school reading word lists. It was found that neither of the word lists contained more than 46 percent of the words…

To examine the relative effectiveness of the language experience approach (LEA) as a means of motivating and teaching reading to behaviorally disordered students, two children were examined. Subjects were an 11-year-old (Jimmy) and an 8-year-old (Bobby), who were placed in a classroom with nine other children identified as emotionally disturbed.…

The primary purpose of this study was to provide empirical evidence for the assumption that if the essential subskills of word attack are mastered, then functional word attack ability will result. To obtain such evidence, the study was designed to test the functional word attack ability of 140 elementary school students who had been taught the…

This study evaluated the effects of using the Edmark Reading Program, Level 1, to develop sight-word vocabulary in first graders at risk for reading failure. This program is a highly structured approach based on providing explicit, direct instruction that is intensive, focused, and not of brief duration. The 62 students receiving the intervention…

To determine how the difficulty of print materials affected elementary school students' sight copying accuracy and productivity and to explain correlate variance related to copying, 149 students in grades four, six, and eight were assigned materials to copy for three minutes. All subjects copied passages at grade level and at two grades above and…

This practicum was developed (1) to improve, supervise, and disseminate a model cross-age tutoring program, and (2) to determine if a tutorial program would increase the sight vocabulary of 100 second grade students in the Dallas Independent School District. A secondary purpose was to determine if such a program would improve the reading grades,…

The participants in this study, Joelle, Peter, Troy, and Malia (pseudonyms), are part of the approximately 25% of adults in the United States who function in the realm of low literacy. Adult literacy educators continually strive to meet the needs of this population. One challenge is to provide meaningful literacy programs for adults that will…