The purpose of this study was to compare the variety, complexity, and frequency of reading behaviors of three groups of first grade students--students who discontinued from Reading Recovery (D-RR), students who did not discontinue from Reading Recovery (ND-RR), and students who never needed Reading Recovery (A-NRR). Students were asked to read…

Compares remedial readers to more proficient readers in their meaning-making processes during the reading of literary text. Reveals that the remedial readers spend a disproportionate amount of being out of "envisionments"--either attempting to step into one or failing to step in. (MG)

US government mandates to implement intensive phonics instruction in elementary classrooms invoke an alleged scientific superiority of this approach over more meaning-centered models. But curiously absent from this scientific enterprise is a study of the phonics system itself. Advocates of intensive phonics have not demonstrated that the commonly…

Reports on a study stemming from schema theory that assessed the role that background knowledge plays in determining young children's ability to process relationships that are explicitly and fully specified in a text, in comparison to those that are only partially specified by the same text. (Author/HOD)

Assesses fifteen 7- to 12-year-old blind children using standardized measures of intelligence, spelling and reading. Finds they performed poorer when reading than their chronological age would predict. Compares blind and age-matched children's ability to segment heard words, which are written in Braille with and without contractions. Finds words…

This study, with 38 9-year-old poor readers and 40 reading age-matched normally achieving readers, examined qualitative differences in poor readers relative to normally achieving readers of the same reading level. Results suggest that poor readers have worse grapheme phoneme conversion skills and greater reluctance to relinquish the lexical route…

Five studies compared how skilled readers arrived at an understanding of what they were reading with how children learning to read comprehended primers. Undergraduate, second, fourth, and sixth grade students read orally stories in which various aspects of the stories were distorted (pronounceable nonwords substituted for real words, semantically…

Measures native skilled, nonnative skilled, and nonnative nonskilled English readers' word reading times. Finds reading times of native skilled readers were independent of word length, word location, and grammatical word classification compared to nonnative readers. Finds that native readers' reading time was different from nonnative skilled…

Previous studies have shown that where bilinguals have a poorer grasp of some language than monolingual speakers of that language, the deficit has almost invariably revealed itself in reading skill. Also, the deficit in language is usally associated with a relatively lower mean IQ for bilinguals when tested orally. Bilinguals have also been found…

Concludes that the size of a word recognition unit is sensitive to reader skill and context condition. (HOD)

Illustrates and compares skills and process orientations for reading instruction. Tips for teachers of reading are provided. (RH)

Concludes that (1) pointed Hebrew text was read more accurately and rapidly than unpointed text by both adults and children who were fluent readers, and (2) both groups displayed significant effects for context richness, word frequency, and type of Hebrew text. (FL)

Affirms that Piaget's theory is superior to behaviorism in fostering learning. (FL)

While the look-say versus the phonics controversy has existed for years in reading instruction, a similar debate regarding spelling instruction is only now emerging out of the literature and into the hands of the classroom teacher. "Subskill" spelling, most frequently found in current spelling programs, presumes that good spelling is achieved by…

Examines the "levels effect" (the theory that more important text elements are more likely to be remembered than less important elements) in children and adults when reading expository text. Finds differences between adults and children in the extent to which they engaged in the type of processing that resulted in levels effects. (MG)