United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 4.6 calls for all youth and a substantial proportion of adults to be able to read. Progress toward achieving this goal began after the World Conference on Education for All in 1990. Two decades after the conference, national governments, international donor agencies, and local and…

One of the most frequent problems in reading comprehension is the difficulty in making inferences from the text, especially for students with mild disabilities (i.e., children with learning disabilities or with high-functioning autism). It is essential, therefore, that educators include the teaching of reading strategies to improve their students'…

Purpose: To examine the efficacy of Fast ForWord Language (FFW-L) and 2 other interventions for improving the phonemic awareness and reading skills of children with specific language impairment with concurrent poor reading skills. Method: A total of 103 children (age 6;0 to 8;11 [years;months]) with language impairment and poor reading skills…

In order to examine whether any observed relationship between phonological awareness and reading ability in Down syndrome reflects the typical use of a phonologically based approach to reading, 12 children and young adults with Down syndrome were assessed for reading and phonological awareness skills. They were compared to a control group of 14…

A behavioral genetic analysis of general writing ability was conducted using teacher assessments based on UK National Curriculum criteria for a sample of 3296 same-sex pairs of 7-year-old twins. Writing was highly heritable within the normal range (0.66) and at the low extreme (0.70). Environmental influences were almost all non-shared, with…

In the author's experience, a significant source of reading difficulty for many beginning and struggling readers are misconceptions about print concepts so basic teachers assume their students are aware of them. Many children fail to grasp implicit principles of print such as the following: the reader cannot make up the words, the order of letters…

The key questions in reading are: Do school beginners need to be taught anything about reading? How do people adjust their reading process to their purpose? Why is reading proficiency predictable? (Author/IRT)

Two reading experiments demonstrated that 11-year-old children were more likely than 8-year-old children to identify textual anomalies. Results also indicated that an age change in comprehension monitoring need not be contingent upon a parallel age change in constructive processing as indexed by modulation of reading rate. (Author/DB)

Jeanne S. Chall, Roger Farr, John C. Manning, Robert B. Ruddell, Russell G. Stauffer, Dorothy S. Strickland, and Richard L. Venezky comment on significant developments in reading during the 1970s, hopes for the 1980s, and important references dealing with teaching children to read. (DD)

Details a study of the reading development of seven- and nine-year-old deaf children. Concludes that the children progressed satisfactorily in the early stages of reading but had not attained the ability to extract meaning from sentences by age nine. (FL)

Children's understanding and use of anaphora and cohesive ties in comprehending text were studied by using selected school texts that had a number of cohesive ties deleted. It was hypothesized that the replacement of the deleted ties would indicate that the text within the location of a specific tie had been successfully read and understood.…

Investigated seven eight-year-old children's memory for aurally presented sentences. Used a recognition-memory task to probe constructive memory processes in two groups differentiated by reading comprehension. Results indicated the tendency to construct meanings was greater in children who scored higher on reading comprehension. (Author)

Argues that assessment based on the content of a reading curriculum will not necessarily promote more effective instruction than one not so based. Focuses on reading ability, individual differences in the ability to read, instruction in reading, curriculum-based assessment of students' skill in reading, and assessment of comprehension. (RJM)

Test results show that children who are skilled comprehenders are more rapid at oral word decoding than are less skilled comprehenders. (Author/DEP)