A study examined the commonalities that "voracious" readers share, and how their experiences can guide parents, teachers, and librarians in assisting children to become self-actualized readers. Subjects, 25 adults ranging in age from 20 to 67 years, completed a questionnaire concerning their reading histories and habits. Respondents…

This paper presents the seven assessment instruments used by the Student Literacy Corps project at Fitchburg State College, Massachusetts, to document tutee progress and tutor assessment. The paper includes: (1) the Flippo Interest Inventory (for assessing tutee's attitudes toward reading); (2) instructions for the tutor to give to students on how…

Addressing teacher educators, this paper describes the importance of story as a reflective teaching tool, and provides brief annotations of 11 children's picture books (published between 1989 and 1998) which have reading as a critical story element. The children's picture books listed in this paper can be used to assist teachers in analyzing their…

This study investigated parents' perceptions of their child's reading abilities. Parents of 92 fourth grade students completed questionnaires to measure the perception parents held of their child's reading ability in relation to the ability of their child based on standardized test scores. Correlations between the Terra Nova Standardized Test and…

A study investigated various developmental relationships between the attitudes of students toward reading and their reading achievement, with the intention of providing additional information concerning attitudes and attitude testing within school programs. Subjects, 876 students in grades 1 through 8 from a white, middle-class rural community,…

Using the pocket classics can be a painless way to introduce the classics to eighth-grade students. Condensed versions of the classics can take the sting out of the reading, stimulate students' interest, and help prepare them for high school. To offer students in one eighth-grade class some control over their own learning, a contract system was…

Intended as a practical reference tool, this book maintains that nonfiction books are an essential element in the education of all children. The book first discusses the hows and whys of using nonfiction books to encourage reading and enhance a child's innate need to know, then offers tips to link books to children's everyday experiences, and…

The reading habits of 49 elderly adults were surveyed, using the SERA inventory, to examine two hypotheses: there is no difference among elderly adults' perceptions of their reading habits as related to factors of reading skill, preference, physical functioning, attention span/concentration, and emotional well-being, and there are no significant…

The reading profession's current emphasis on whole language may have helped to raise the recurring debate between meaning-based (whole language) and phonics-based (code emphasis) approaches to teaching reading. As some researchers have linked whole language with whole word, phonics advocates have come forth with renewed vigor to offer a series of…

The great majority of the Founding Fathers were readers. In fact, the leading political figures of late eighteenth-century America were generally, and often intimately, acquainted with the output of the greatest European minds of the day--and of the minds of the ancient western world. Two factors above all placed an ineffaceable stamp on the…

To help raise the reading scores and attitudes of selected "at-risk" students from Thomas Jefferson, Springfield Gardens, and Franklin D. Roosevelt High Schools in New York City, a pilot study daily provided students with individual copies of the "New York Daily News" and integrated the use of the paper into regular…

This report examines the nature of the modern basal reader, its economics, and use. First, the report provides a history showing how the confluence of business principles, positivistic science, and behavioral psychology led to the transformation of reading textbooks into basal readers. Next, the report examines objectives and subjective factors…

In his ethnographic study of junior high school literacy activities, David Bloome found support for four theoretical constructs of the student-text interaction: (1) education is a process of cultural transmission; (2) reading is defined in terms of the sociocultural context in which it occurs; (3) the interpretation of behavior and of signs occurs…

Because any reading or writing research project or teaching method rests on some kind of epistemological assumptions and some models of reading and writing processes, a coherent theoretical approach to the interrelationships of the reading and writing processes is needed. In light of the post-Einsteinian scientific paradigm and Peircean semiotics,…

Children are taught to read in a number of ways, are helped by reading specialists, tutors, parents, and peers, and are provided with a variety of materials designed to meet their needs and interests. Yet many children grow up with not only a dislike for reading, but a fear of it. It is not enough for teachers to develop reading skills in their…