Phonological awareness has little, if anything, to do with reading or the acquisition of literacy. Learned opinion has been divided as to the relationship of phonological awareness and reading. Some scholars hold that the ability to analyze speech into discrete phonic segments is a precursor to, even a cause of, successful reading acquisition,…

A study examined the development and functioning of a task targeted toward helping students use context clues more effectively. Subjects, five fifth- or sixth-grade remedial students of low verbal ability, were presented target words in contexts of one to three sentences taken from fifth and sixth grade basal stories as part of a 5-step training…

Libraries serve our nation and its citizens in two primary ways: by preserving our common culture, and by nurturing and sustaining democracy itself. A particular democratic function of libraries is fostering reading. As noted in two reports recently issued by the U.S. Department of Education, "What Works" and "First Lessons," it is imperative to…

A study examined growth in oral reading fluency in second, third, and fourth grade students after a treatment of intensive instruction. The 53 subjects were assigned to either an experimental or a control group, and all were administered form A of the Diagnostic Screening Test: Reading, to determine their independent reading level, instructional…

Arguing that teachers need to provide direct instruction if they expect children to learn to apply semantic or syntactic clues as they are reading, this paper presents a variety of activities for teaching children to use context clues. Among the more than 35 activities described are: gathering clues from pictures, using a language experience…

Three experiments were conducted to determine whether an instructional set for visual imagery would facilitate reading comprehension of elementary school children. In the first experiment, 38 fifth graders randomly assigned to experimental and control groups were given the Durrell-Sullivan Reading Capacity and Achievement tests after the…

A study explored the effects of prequestions (questions provided prior to reading) and the influence of a prediction strategy upon the amount and types of information recalled by children in grades three through six. Subjects, 188 students in grades three through six who were reading at third grade level or above, read a 900-word expository…

A teaching technique that leads to auditory conceptualization--the ability to determine the number and order of sounds embedded within syllables--shows promise of measurably improving the reading proficiency of children of all ability levels. Based on C. and P. Lindamood's published technique, "Auditory Discrimination in Depth," the…

The effect of reading remediation that emphasized phonetic decoding was investigated in 61 children with pure reading disorders, controlling for the influence of nonspecific treatment effects. The children were randomly assigned to receive instruction in reading or in other subjects for four months; and they were reevaluated immediately after, two…

Three studies examined the nature of individual differences and the role of advance information in reading comprehension. The subjects, 116 college students, read short passages--in some cases preceded by a given type of advance organizer--recalled the information therein, and finally sorted ideas from the passage into groups of similar ideas.…

This paper examines the concept of creativity through the identification of traits and characteristics found in the so-called creative personality. The works on creativity of several scholars and researchers are briefly reviewed, including those by Ellis Paul Torrance, Donald W. MacKinnon, Sarnoff A. Mednick, Paul Heist, Philip Wesley Jackson, and…

Teaching reading should not be a matter of transmitting stored information, concepts, and patterns of thinking into the learner's head; rather, it should be a way of working with children to facilitate the acquisition of information and the creation of meaningful ideas about the world in which they live. Teachers should examine certain questions…

This paper briefly reviews recent reading research which is based on the concept of first identifying effective reading teachers in terms of students' reading achievement and then considering process variables (instructional strategies) which could account for the students' achievement. It is suggested that the advantage of this research approach…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of systematic instruction with cloze tasks on the reading achievement of primary grade children. The cloze procedure was selected as an instructional strategy because of the close relationship of the cloze procedure to the psycholinguistic model of the reading process. Twenty-two first and nine…

This paper presents some theoretical background and practical guidelines for the teacher choosing literature concerned with human values. Kohlberg's theory of moral development, which postulates seven stages of development, is described, and a discussion on how literature can be used to further moral development at each stage is presented.…