This booklet provides specific, workable suggestions for parents in helping them create the best atmosphere they can for developing their childrens' reading. The booklet begins with general principles for establishing a home reading program, and continues with a checklist of fifty specific suggestions for parents on helping their children become…

Because they have difficulty in processing textual material, learning disabled, limited English speaking students, and reading deficient students create special problems for all teachers. Content area teachers can help these students by using a simple three-step strategy. The first phase, labeled TALK, involves prereading, with the readers…

In the past, phonics instruction has done little to lessen the difficulties that many poor readers have with decoding words quickly and accurately enough to construct meaning from text. Based on an analysis of the research literature in decoding and a four-year cycle of program development, a new program was created for teaching decoding to poor…

Both writers and readers experience auditory imagery of intonations, accents, and hesitations in written language, and some aspects of this "written language prosody" are made partially overt through punctuation. Two studies explored the relationship between written language prosody and punctuation. The first study asked people to read…

With the use of verbal report strategies, a study was conducted to examine (1) the types of comprehension strategies readers use to process familiar and less familiar texts and (2) the differential use of think aloud strategies by average and below average readers. Subjects were 15 tenth grade male students in upstate New York. Two weeks prior to…

A survey was conducted with 166 undergraduate students enrolled in teacher education and developmental reading classes to determine student background knowledge in three major areas: study and coping skills; current events, geography, and history; and general vocabulary. Among the findings were the following: (1) Students in both groups spent more…

Intended for elementary and secondary school teachers, this handbook provides practical instruction for the development of students' study strategies. Each of the four chapters begins with a study guide and closes with a reaction guide, thus illustrating for the reader an excellent study strategy that teachers may use with text materials in their…

A two-part study investigated the effects of a text adjunct on poor readers' recall and comprehension. The text adjunct, a thematic organizer, was designed to define explicitly the central theme of a passage, relate the theme to students' prior knowledge, and provide cohesion among the ideas of the passage to accommodate text structure. Subjects…

The Virginia Reading to Learn Project is a state-wide project designed to help content area teachers at the middle school and secondary school levels teach their students how to comprehend their content area textbooks. Teachers learn instructional strategies and techniques within the framework of the total reading process incorporating reading,…

Designed to expand the scope of the inservice reading program to help parents understand the whole language reading strategies used to remediate students, a practicum conducted a parent survey, carried out parent training sessions, and evaluated the program's success. The practicum focused on 323 parent participants from five Chapter 1 elementary…

This document presents diagnostic and prescriptive techniques that will enable teachers to enhance secondary school students' learning through reading in content areas. Three terms used in the document are defined in Section I: "vocabulary skills" include word attack skills, sight word skills, and word meanings; "comprehension skills" are literal,…

A study was conducted to assess the effect of contrasting mastery learning procedures on the reading achievement of high and low ability students. Subjects were 48 high and 40 low ability first grade students randomly assigned to either a typical commercial basal reading series mastery treatment or an alternative mastery learning treatment that…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 25 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the effect of reading ability, mode of presentation, and passage familiarity on the general and precise comprehension of expository text; (2) a constructivist…

Intended for teachers and administrators, this book examines systematic observation of reading behaviors and reading recovery procedures to help children with reading problems. Part one deals with systematic observation, beginning with a discussion of the reading process and reading programs. Following that, it describes the use of the diagnostic…

Explores issues arising from a research project which studied ways of meeting the reading needs of trainee primary school teachers (from Malawi and Tanzania) of English as a foreign language. Topics discussed include: the classroom teaching situation; teaching "quality"; and integration of materials and methods. (CB)