Because reading is not a natural process like language, young learners must be taught to read. Knowledge about how the reading brain develops has critical implications for understanding which teaching methods to use and helps reconceptualize previous debates. In this excerpt from "Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World",…

To study the notion of stage processing independence in reading, measures of the decoding process and semantic processing were obtained on a sample of elementary pupils. Performance on these measures was related to lexical accessibility, letter properties and the familiarity of the words used in the measures. (Author/JKS)

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…

Two roles for phonological recoding, as a back-up mechanism used when visual word identification fails and as a self-teaching mechanism for visual word identification, are examined in view of research findings on development of reading comprehension and on the relationship of reading disabilities and phonological processing deficits. Teaching…

This experiment attempted to discover under what circumstances, if any, children use whole words, syllables, letter clusters, or letters as units during reading. The results indicated that syllables and letter clusters are probably not processed as units for any type of word, but there was slight evidence that letters may function as units,…

Discusses the basic precepts of the Reading Miscue Inventory as an evaluation of oral reading. (TO)

Intended to help reading instructors better understand the nature of reading errors, this report carefully examines one type of error--word omissions. Following a review of research in the area of omissions, the report discusses in detail the omission patterns, in context, of a single reader, then summarizes four key points about omissions…

Eighty-four elementary school children participated in a two-part experiment replicating an earlier experiment that tested the hypothesis that children would offer semantic explanations for words presented orally more frequently than for words presented in written form. This experiment used subjects from a population different in socioeconomic…

Suggests teaching a compare/contrast method of word identification rather than teaching syllabication rules to decode words and describes research investigating this technique. (MKM)

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…

Concludes that the ability to detect small differences in pairs of pictures, letters, or words does not change beyond grade 3, but the ability to recognize sound-alike words improves through the grades. (RB)

Tests the hypothesis that readers who differ in comprehension ability and are similar in their ability to decode single words differ in their ability to read words in sentence context. (FL)

No difference was found in recall of nonverbal stimuli between normal and learning disabled readers, suggesting that primary reading deficits in learning disabled children are related to verbal encoding deficiencies (visual-verbal integration) and not to deficiencies of visual memory, as suggested by the perceptual deficit hypothesis. (Author/GDC)

Shows how older, largely context-free models of reading and its instruction became changed into a multidimensional, context-dependent orientation toward written language and the reading process and concludes with suggestions for using a variety of contextual strategies to increase reading comprehension. (HOD)

Examines the relationships among accuracy and latency of word recognition and comprehension by nonfluent readers and whether component letter or holistic processing was used in word recognition by these same readers. (HOD)