The Informational Text Reading Inventory (ITRI) was created when the Center for Innovation in Assessment (CIA) observed that students in grade four experience a significant drop in performance in all of their subject areas. CIA researched solutions and identified the critical issue as the students' struggle to apply the reading skills they have…

Many teacher educators have concluded that the format of graduate reading practicum reports (which have been patterned after medical or psychological reports), needs to be reexamined or refined. In the University of Central Florida's reading practicum classes, practicum reports are becoming more simplified, with pedagogical and psychological…

This teacher's manual is designed to accompany the reader and the workbook of the same title. An introduction to the series is followed by a discussion of course objectives and diagnostic testing of reading. The guide follows the structure of the companion reader, which consists of 7 stories dealing with vowels, school, and family. A glossary…

An experiment was conducted with twenty native French speakers using a set of four reading passages, each followed by five multiple choice comprehension questions. Each subject was tested twice when reading aloud and twice when reading silently. Other test materials included a pre-test designed to check whether certain lexical items from the…

Based on adult learning and reading acquisition theories, the model forming the basis of a one-semester graduate course resulted in increased competencies of thirty-five presently employed or future adult basic education teachers each of whom taught reading to one adult illiterate during the course. The model consisted of assessment of reading by…

This paper contains descriptions of activities that have proven successful in one middle school's reading program. Each description contains a commentary on the activity, its objective, the skills it reinforces or teaches, and the materials needed. Among the activities presented are a method of teaching vowel sounds; a creative writing activity…

ALTHOUGH TRANSLATION, A SKILL NOT CONSIDERED USEFUL IN A BASIC AUDIOLINGUAL MODERN LANGUAGE PROGRAM, HAS BEEN DISPENSED WITH, READING, ANOTHER SPECIALIZED SKILL NOT AUTOMATICALLY ACQUIRED ALONG WITH THE ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE ORALLY, APPEARS TO BE LESS CONTROVERSIAL. IF, THEN, READING CONTINUES AS A GOAL OF LANGUAGE TEACHING, IT MUST BE TESTED NOT…

In order to bridge the gap between educational research and practice, a study was concluded to identify specific reading skills which posed particularly difficult problems for Mexican American first grade children, but apparently caused little difficulty for their Anglo counterparts. Seventeen words emerged as being particularly difficult for the…

Once a year, all children in grades two through four in the schools of a suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark, are administered silent reading tests. The test scores become the basis for an hour-long dialogue between the respective classroom teacher and a reading specialist. The focus of the dialogue is the improvement of instruction for each child, and…

The Wisconsin Design for Reading Skill Development is a vehicle for implementing a skills-centered approach to reading instruction. The components of the design are (1) management guidelines; (2) an essential skills list for six areas (word attack, comprehension, study skills, self-directed reading, interpretive reading, and creative reading) and…

The symposium theme of "Today's Child and Learning to Read" provides the focal point for the 12 papers included in this volume. Each is concerned with an individual area of reading and the relevance of that area to the needs of today's students. Nearly half the articles deal with specific current approaches to reading instruction and their…

Contents of this booklet include: (1) "What's wrong with reading tests?", Deborah Meier, covering the following areas: the definition of reading, the social context of testing, the trouble with the tests, and how children handle tests; (2) "An English view of evaluation," an excerpt from a longer interview with Kenneth Barker at Froebel Institute…

This response to Vicki Snider (EC 602 672) claims that teaching reading through students' learning style strengths has resulted in accelerated learning and significant gains in student motivation, reading fluency, and comprehension. The commentary discusses the research base on phonics instruction, learning styles, and The Reading Style Inventory.…

Intended to help dispel several unsupported "myths" about reading instruction, this book analyzes a selected group of teaching practices that have been supported by reading experts but not by research findings. The "myths" discussed in the first 12 chapters of the book are as follows: (1) phonics hinders comprehension; (2) unpredictable spelling…

Focusing on research and evaluation in college reading, the papers in this volume were drawn from the ninth annual meeting of the National Reading Conference held in 1959. Among the topics discussed in the 19 papers are the following: a proposed model of reading comprehension, factors affecting reading test performance, student attitudes toward…