Emphasizes that, in order to comprehend, a reader must chunk the many words of a sentence into meaningful groups of words. Offers suggestions for developing "thought units" in the upper grades. (FL)

Explores the concept of emergent literacy, discussing what children know about reading and writing, how they come to know it, and what this information means for classroom practices and school policy. (MM)

Looks at research and practice in the area of idioms and offers suggestions for teaching them effectively. (FL)

Because students encounter a steady stream of new words in their reading, structural analysis--the ability to gain information about the meaning, pronunciation, and part of speech of new words from their prefixes, roots, and suffixes--is an important component of skilled reading. It follows, then, that effective reading instruction should include…

Discusses story grammar and story schema. Demonstrates how two schema-based strategies--semantic webbing and the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity--can aid in improving comprehension. (FL)

Intended for those who want to know more about reading and how it is taught, but who will themselves probably not specialize in the teaching of reading, this book addresses such questions as (1) Why read? (2) What motivation does one have for reading? and (3) What does reading provide as a means of communication that cannot just as easily be…

A paper dealing with the comprehension of metaphor and a second paper addressing the ramifications of the first paper's ideas for teaching practices are contained in this report. The opening section of the first paper explains why language theorists and scholars in a number of disciplines are interested in metaphor. Its next section deals with…

Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA) is a curriculum tool for use in the preservice preparation of reading teachers. The questioning procedure in RMA is designed to encourage consideration of reading as a meaning-getting process rather than as a process of seeking accuracy or perfection. The technique, which involves the teachers in analyzing a…

Noting that while the language experience approach to reading instruction assumes that the learner is intuitively familiar with the language and that this familiarity facilitates recognition of the language on the printed page, this paper argues that students learning to read in a second language do not have the same degree of intuitive…

A schema developed for the teaching of reading involves five factors: learning, language, clues, mediums of communication, and adaptive processes. Learning involves four tasks, taught in the following sequence: comprehension, comparison of semantic shapes, composition of the whole into parts, and concentration. There are four general language…

When readers encounter the dissonance of conflicting ideas and are motivated by the psychological discomfort to resolve the dissonance, the effort to alleviate this discomfort may well result in the activation of those cognitive processes termed critical reading and thinking. With this in mind, one approach to teaching critical reading treats…

Argues that composing and comprehending are process-oriented thinking skills that are basically interrelated, and suggests ways that these skills can be taught. (JL)

Reflecting the work of Yetta Goodman on child language development, this paper examines Goodman's five "roots of literacy" and offers suggestions on classroom techniques for nurturing these roots. The first half of the paper explains how Goodman identified the roots of literacy and describes each of them, including (1) print awareness in…

Viewing literacy as the ability to make use of all available possibilities of written language, the essays in this collection deal with a broad range of literacy related topics and issues. Titles of the 13 essays, written over a 10-year period, are as follows: (1) "The Politics of Ignorance"; (2) "Twelve Easy Ways to Make Learning to Read…

The approaches used for reading instruction in the United States and in the People's Republic of China are different and incompatible. In China, English reading is taught intensively, through close-reading or detailed oral analysis of brief texts and with great attention to individual words and phrases. This "bottom-up" processing style,…