Reading teachers should choose activities and experiences for the classroom that are central to reading. Although a sense of security surrounds the teaching of testable finite reading skills, it is necessary to choose language arts experiences that are not so readily evaluated but still are basic to reading. Listening instruction can facilitate…

Elementary teachers should focus attention on language activities that involve naturally the reciprocal relationships among listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Teachers need to value, use, and make useful the background and language of all students, through a Language Experience Approach (LEA) in which students dictate and write about…

This two-part paper emphasizes the importance of language enrichment and active listening skills as a basis for reading pleasure. While acknowledging the need for developing fundamental decoding skills, the first section advocates that adults read aloud to children from books reflecting the adult's reading interests, containing creative language,…

This document discusses the role of parents and the role of the community at large in the reading development and improvement of children. One way parents can assist in reading improvement is by surrounding their children with language from their earliest years. Nancy Larrick, in her "Parent's Guide to Children's Reading," suggests that parents…

Stressing language development as the prime component of all learning, this resource book presents suggestions to teachers to aid them in developing children's descriptive language. Basic to the described activities is the concept that vocabulary development is essentially concept development, requires a variety of experiences, and results from…