Intended for use mainly by secondary school teachers of students with low reading achievement, the Reading to Learn (RTL) model provides the teacher with a way to assess, prescribe, adjust for individual differences, and develop reading skills while teaching content. An informal screening test (IST), the first step, determines which students are…

Doubts about the reading vocabulary adequacies of today's high school graduates led to an experiment with a list of 199 difficult words culled from the "Reader's Digest." College juniors and seniors (298 in the first stage and 388 in the second stage) were asked to indicate whether they knew the pronunciation and the meaning of the…

Designed to improve underachieving high school students' reading and communication skills, the Secondary Developmental Reading Program served 741 ninth, tenth, and eleventh graders in 13 Columbus, Ohio, public schools. Funding was made available through the Ohio Disadvantaged Pupil Program Fund (DPPF). Fourteen teachers participated in the 1987-88…

A whole language approach is emphasized in the reading clinic at the University of Missouri (St. Louis) because disabled readers need to practice their skills simultaneously in speaking, listening, and reading. At the clinic, teachers are encouraged to learn and use several approaches to teaching reading. However, the language experience approach…

A study investigated whether a visual selective attention deficit with its presumed basis in slow visual processing referred to the same phonological recoding deficit, or whether they were two independent sources of reading disability. Subjects were children aged 7 to 15 referred to a university clinic (the Waterloo Child Assessment…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 35 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the oral, written, and reading syntax of 46 learning disabled children; (2) the effects of oral reading rate and reinforcement on reading comprehension; (3)…

Four cities in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have been engaged since 1977 in a joint study of the junior level of elementary school. (More than 5,000 pupils are involved in the study.) The Department of Education at the University of Turku joined the project in the autumn term of 1979. The purpose of the Swedish project, reported here, was to…

Examines the development of word recognition skills of 80 school children (grades two-four). Good beginning readers rapidly learn to recognize high frequency words from visual input alone and simultaneously expand and consolidate spelling sound correspondences. Younger and poor readers rely more on phonological information in word decoding.…

Examines the nature of scientific discussion and places the problem of scientific literacy within the broad context of critical analytic reading skills. (FL)

Examples are provided that show readability in action in diverse settings. The first shows how readability analysis resulted in a new fluency monitoring protocol in three school districts in Northern California. The others present hypothetical school, clinic, and research situations that a speech language pathologist might encounter. (Author/CR)

Thirteen poor readers, aged 9-12, listened to and read audiotaped stories, while 13 controls read from basal readers. Experimental subjects showed improved oral reading, whereas controls showed significantly larger gains in word attack skills. There were no between-group differences in silent reading, a cloze comprehension test, or isolated word…

This longitudinal study examined gender differences in motivation and the role of reading prerequisites, that is phonemic and comprehension skills, in the formation of motivational tendencies from kindergarten up to grade 1. The longitudinal sample consisted of 157 Finnish-speaking children. Teachers rated children's adaptive goals, (i.e. task…

Early identification of problem readers and appropriate interventions would reduce subsequent failure and would enhance reading skills. Screening instruments measure the risk/probability that reading problems will occur. In this article we discuss certain aspects with regard to the most important indices of screening measures: predictive accuracy,…

The articulatory awareness task, which was found by Griffiths and Frith (2002) to discriminate ex-dyslexic from non-dyslexic adults, was given to three groups of Japanese college students with different English reading abilities. Two unexpected results emerged: (1) Articulatory awareness performance was generally poor across the groups, thereby…

This study investigated the ability of temporal processing measures obtained before school entry to predict early reading development in an unselected sample of 125 children (68 males, 57 females). Visual and auditory temporal order judgment (TOJ) tasks measured at Preschool (mean age 5.36 years) significantly predicted letter and word…