Explains how to organize a "print laboratory," a safe, nonthreatening environment where students can experiment with all kinds of print found in the real world. Presents strategies designed to promote independent reading and comprehension. (FL)

Concludes that although sentence-long context did not facilitate the reading accuracy of primary grade children, the children did appear to be exploiting contextual information in their reading of sentences, with a relatively high proportion of reading errors being contextually acceptable. (FL)

Presents a study that followed a group of 12 individuals over a three-year period as they first participated in a preservice teacher education program leading to K-8 teacher certification and a Masters in Teaching, and for the first two years of their teaching careers. Finds that teachers' funds of knowledge interact in complex ways to affect…

Indicates that segmentation significantly aided the comprehension of narrative and expository materials for hearing impaired students who read at a second-grade level. (NKA)

Investigates the effects of four types of prereading activities on comprehension of Australian fifth grade students: (1) irrelevant tasks (control); (2) pictorial introductions to the subject; (3) content-directed questions; and (4) free-association to the passage's titles. Determines that, although the pictorial introduction group performed best,…

Concludes that teacher enthusiasm training is effective in increasing levels of observable teacher enthusiasm and that teachers so trained had an effect on their students' attitudes toward reading. (FL)

Describes a project in which underprepared college freshmen in a basic skills English class heard materials read aloud while they followed along in the text. Concludes that the students made gains in writing skills but not in reading. (FL)

Indicates that while middle-class preschool children may not have fully developed concepts of linguistic terms used in an instructional setting and may not be able to indicate word-by-word matching of spoken and written words, they do have a functional concept for the purpose of reading and writing. (FL)

Discusses research that indicates the value of prereading and postreading in content area reading; explains the encoding specificity principle, which is the basis of methods that present similar cues during prereading and postreading. Describes several instructional applications of this principle. (GT)

Examines the content of the pamphlet "What Works: Research about Teaching and Learning." Asks (1) what it means to say it is "drawn from""Becoming a Nation of Readers"; and (2) whether the editors are guilty of political chicanery with reading research, as some have argued. (RS)

Examines the validity of estimates of instructional reading level produced by the Reading Comprehension Test of the 1986 Metropolitan Achievement Tests (MAT). Compares reading level estimates provided by the MAT, basal reader placement tests, an informal reading inventory, and classroom teachers' judgments. Suggests that each method, because of…

Investigates whether standardized tests measure the same comprehension construct as free recall assessment techniques. (FL)

Concludes that underachieving readers appeared to make significantly less use of the phonemic, graphic, and grammatical features of text when providing miscue responses to cohesive items than they did when making miscue responses to the text as a whole. In addition, they often lost the meaning relationships conveyed by the text when providing…

Reports that at the first grade level, parental tutoring appeared to produce significant increases in student reading, language arts, and math achievement, while at the second grade level there were no significant differences on posttest measures between groups receiving tutoring from their parents and those not. (FL)

Examines different approaches to reading acquisition used in four first grades of a suburban elementary school. Supports the use of a language experience approach as a viable alternative to the basal reader approach for teaching reading and writing. (JK)