Selections from the last three basal reading series produced by the Houghton Mifflin Company were examined to determine what improvements were made. One of the fundamental changes occurring in the 1971 revision ("Readers") was the replacement of grade designations with numerical levels that provided a better match between student and…

The sentences in two first grade basal readers were categorized using Joan Tough's language function classification system to determine whether lower level basal readers allowed children to use their knowledge of language functions in reading. The range of language functions and language uses in the basals was compared to those that Tough found in…

The instruction provided by two beginning reading programs (the Ginn 720 and the Palo Alto 1973 reading programs) are analyzed and compared in this paper on the basis of such factors as phoneme-grapheme correspondence and phonics instruction, sight word learning, and the development of reading comprehension. The comparison focuses primarily on the…