In this article, I report on a small project involving the use of guided reading groups, levelled texts and running records in a multilingual primary school in Singapore. I focus on running records and ask whether their use is suitable pedagogically and practically for the Singaporean context. The analysis of 22 records of primary one and primary…

This paper on the nature of instruction as it has been informed by instructional research is organized into two major sections. The background section describes the origin and evolution of the research that has been conducted into teacher response toward reading miscues, while the second section relates this research to other classroom research…

Noting that the verbal interactions that transpire between teacher and student in the classroom setting are central to the instructional process, this paper offers reading teachers a systematic means of examining their own interactive patterns in the context of oral reading instruction. In addition, it provides teachers with a way of inspecting…

The responses of students, asked to retell stories they had read, were studied through language miscue analysis. The research yielded insights in how readers: (1) predict the author's message; (2) form concepts essential for comprehension; and (3) relate stories to their cultural background. Implications for classroom instruction are discussed.…

Research indicates that engagement with text is critical to becoming a good reader and can be fostered in primary grades by using informal assessments of individual student's reading ability to guide instruction. Describes running record, miscue analysis, and cloze-procedure assessment tools and the assessment task of oral retelling. Sidebars list…

Following a review of empirical research on teacher feedback to students' wrong responses, this paper describes a paradigm for use with direct instruction materials, applying the feedback model to comprehension tasks from traditional reading and science textbooks. The next section details a classification system for wrong responses grouped into…

Each of the 12 articles in this book deals with an aspect of linguistics theory and its application to understanding or teaching reading. The topics covered include: defining reading in proper perspective, the relevance of applied linguistics for teachers of reading, why children should want to learn to read, dialects and reading, the features of…

To provide the most effective instruction, materials, and support for beginning readers, teachers need to know if young children are more likely to process from print to meaning-- bottom-up or text-driven processing--or to interpret print to follow meaning--top-down or concept-driven processing. While some studies reveal a correlation between…

The first of a two-volume set, this monograph concentrates on a rapidly developing area of reading research, comprehension. Eleven articles cover theoretical aspects, ways of measuring comprehension, and strategies for teaching. Sense of story and its effect on comprehension and the facility to read, listen to, retell, and create stories are…

Addressing subjects ranging from reading readiness to phonics, this book examines several fundamental elements of beginning reading instruction. Divided into 12 chapters, the book begins with a chapter providing a general overview of reading instruction, including the debate between the perception of reading as decoding or comprehension, and other…