Answering the call for a comprehensive textbook on what reading teachers really need to know, this is the book that arms educators with not just the what and the how, but also the why that other texts don't cover. Two prominent literacy experts team with an elementary school specialist to give preservice teachers an easy-to-understand textbook…

Two studies of second graders at risk for reading disability, which were guided by levels of language and functional reading system theory, focused on reading comprehension in this population. In Study 1 (n = 96), confirmatory factor analysis of five comprehension measures loaded on one factor in both fall and spring of second grade. Phonological…

This study examined individual differences among beginning readers of English as a foreign language (EFL). The study concentrated on the effects of underlying first language (L1) knowledge as well as EFL letter and vocabulary knowledge. Phonological and morphological awareness, spelling, vocabulary knowledge, and word reading in Hebrew L1, in…

Share's "self-teaching" model proposes that readers acquire most knowledge about the orthographic structure of words incidentally while reading independently. In the current study, the self-teaching hypothesis was tested by simulating everyday reading through the use of real words, analyzing the effects of context, and considering the independent…

This study examined the development of reading and reading-related skills for native and nonnative speakers of English through the first and second grades. Tasks assessing reading, phonological, and language processing were administered to 36 native English speakers (NS) and 38 children who spoke English as a second language (ELL). Both ELL and NS…

Noting that parent involvement in student schoolwork ranks high as a cause of academic success for most children, this book helps parents act as tutors in reading and writing for their first- and second-grade children. It offers both general guidelines and specific strategies and activities to use for accomplishing specific objectives, such as…

A study investigated the ability of native-Chinese-speaking graduate students (N=18) at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh to infer word meanings from context in two passages written in English. One passage came from the "China Daily" and the other from an editorial in a student newspaper. Glosses were provided…

A study examined the effects of controlled language ("primerese") on children's reading. Four primerese stories from basal readers were rewritten to make the language less controlled and more natural, and the effects of these changes on several aspects of oral reading and comprehension were examined. Sixty first graders were divided into…

A contract deliverable on the NIE Communication Skills Project, this report consists of three separate documents describing the instructional implications of the analytic and empirical work carried out for the "Classroom Instruction in Reading Comprehension" part of the project: (1) Guidelines for Phrasal Segmentation; (2) Parsing Tasks…

The primary focuse of the research project reported in this paper over a five-year period has been on investigating the effectiveness of vocabulary teaching strategies, with particular emphasis on the two semantic-based instructional strategies of semantic mapping and semantic feature analysis. A series of five varied studies evaluated these…

Investigating the selective attention strategy, a study examined the type of attention allocated to important information by good and poor readers. Also tested was the methodological validity of using a conceptual (word recognition) perceptual (tachistoscopic word flash) task as a means of investigating the types of information processing that may…

As part of a larger effort to develop a test battery for diagnosing difficulties with various word recognition subskills among mainstreamed students in grades 2 through 5, four experiments were conducted to compare the abilities of good and poor readers to read a frequency-graduated series of irregularly spelled words first in isolation and then…

Research has consistently shown that vocabulary knowledge, including both word recognition skills and understanding of word meaning, is highly predictive of achievement in other aspects of reading--oral and silent reading and comprehension. The importance of instruction in word recognition and decoding has been recently demonstrated by the rise in…

Noting that both comprehension and decoding are used by effective readers and that both processes should be taught, this concept paper focuses on effective strategies for reading instruction. Following an introduction, the first section focuses on the conclusions drawn about word identification by reading researchers. Subsections include…

Semantically congruous and incongruous sentences that varied in their syntactic complexity served as the contextual material in a study investigating the use of contextual cues in ongoing word recognition. The dependent variable was the time necessary to name target words that were preceded by the various context conditions. Subjects were 24…