This report explains why reading story books to young children (an activity assumed to help in the acquisition of literacy, although there is no unambiguous evidence in support of this assumption) is likely to be important and reviews the evidence about the role it might play in literacy development. The first section of the report examines…

Students at the secondary and postsecondary levels exhibit difficulty in the oral reading of scientific terminology, in part because of the abundance of polysyllabic words derived from Greek and Latin. Some of the problems observed include faulty stress placement, vowel insertion and deletion, vowel discrimination, and consonant insertion. Such…

A study examined the effects of instruction in meaningful units on the comprehension and fluency of poor readers in the fourth grade. Subjects were five fourth-grade students in a northeast Georgia school classified as poor readers. Method of instruction included modeling smooth reading with appropriate junctures and good intonation. The…

This research study investigated the theoretical reading orientation (sound-centered, word-centered, or meaning-centered) and reading performance of 20 students of various language backgrounds and proficiency levels in an adult English-as-a-second-language program. The research attempted to test the hypothesis that these readers would be able to…

Intended to foster playreading skills in high school students, this lesson plan can be used to teach the essential ingredients of a play in a single class period and can be used verbatim or adapted as desired. The plan includes a phase for motivating student interest in reading plays, a discussion of the skills needed for reading a script, and a…

Intended for elementary school teachers and librarians, this book was designed to help in the development of reading programs for young children. Five sections are included: (1) planning ahead, which includes getting organized, making decorations, collecting "junque" (craft materials and other items needed for craft activities); (2) conducting…

Based on an integrated approach to reading instruction, this report of the 1985 Manitoba Reading Assessment includes a reading survey test, with an individual measure of listening-speaking and oral and silent reading performance, a reading interest inventory, and a teacher questionnaire. The 1985 Assessment also re-administered selected items from…

A study examined oral and silent reading rates at various levels of difficulty to establish criterion rates for fluent reading at the fourth grade level. Subjects, 27 male and 45 female students from 6 classes in 3 public schools in central Oklahoma who read at an average of more than one year above grade placement, had their oral and silent…

This paper presents an informal account of two studies concerned with the significant positive effect which students reading to a parent or other adult has on the students' reading performance. The paper describes the first study, conducted between 1975/76 and 1978/79 in London, in which over 2000 multiracial, working class children took books…

The propositions and inferences in a narrative story can be classified into two sets: the structurally explicit are those concerned with the central theme or structure of the story, and the incidentally explicit deal with information peripheral to this theme. This study compared readers and listeners from grades three and five in their…

To improve the accuracy of the informal reading inventory (IRI), a differential set of criteria is necessary for both word recognition and comprehension scores for different levels and reading conditions. In initial evaluation, word recognition scores should reflect only errors of insertions, omissions, mispronunciations, substitiutions, unkown…

This collection of articles about children's literature contains the following articles: "Books in the Life of the Young Child" and "Traditional Literature: Children's Legacy" by Bernice E. Cullinan, "Encouraging Language Growth" by John Warren Stewig, "Promoting Language and Concept Development" by Dorothy S. Strickland, "Fostering Understanding…

This reading inventory was constructed from vocabulary lists and stories in Lippincott's Basic Reading Series (1971 edition). Designed to yield an estimate of a child's instructional reading level for grades one through eight, this program comprises reading selections and tests which are individually administered and to which students respond…

A study examined the relationships between retelling--an indicator of reading comprehension obtained through a student's oral recall of a story--and three other indicators of reading comprehension representing various viewpoints in comprehension measurement: miscues, a post oral-reading cloze test, and a passage dependent multiple choice test.…

This account of the intonation of English is part of ongoing research at the University of Birmingham, England. It attempts to take account of how intonation contributes to the communicative value of an act of speech. An introductory chapter provides a short discussion of some crucial terms: pitch, loudness, stress, rhythm, and tone unit. The…