This paper takes a critical look at the Commission on Reading report, "Becoming a Nation of Readers," to suggest some directions for future research. The paper analyzes some of the general statements made in the report and focuses in depth on three issues: motivation and reading, comprehension instruction, and emergent literacy. The…

Reviews the reading process in Arabic as a function of vowels and sentence context. Reviews reading accuracy and reading comprehension results in light of cross-cultural reading to develop a more comprehensive reading theory. Presents the phonology, morphology and sentence context of Arabic in two suggested reading models for poor/beginner Arabic…

Covering studies from psychology, education, linguistics, and literature, this review of reading research in Sweden published in the 1980s includes sections on early reading development or emergent literacy, reading disabilities, and reading comprehension. Material in the review was selected using the following criteria: (1) only research…

This catalog deals with an exhibition of historical reading materials used in the United States--old primers, spellers, and readers--which contained mostly items from privately owned collections. The catalog is divided into the following chronological sections: (1) Following in the Footsteps of Our English Forebears: The Alphabet Method Reigns…

Maintains that practitioners have a goldmine of evidence upon which to design effective educational programs for beginning and problem readers. Outlines current knowledge of the beginning stages of reading acquisition for both normal and problem readers and relates this knowledge to current language arts curricular practices. (BS)

A review was conducted of the research on error detection studies completed with children, adolescents, and young adults to determine at what age children begin to detect errors in texts. The studies were grouped according to the subjects' ages. The focus of the review was on the following aspects of each study: the hypothesis that guided the…

Focusing on providing an interdisciplinary framework, the papers in this monograph attempt to synthesize knowledge about comprehension from the points of view of cognitive psychology, textlinguistics, artificial intelligence, and sociolinguistics, as well as from the more conventional perspective of language education. Papers include…

Controversies over the best way to teach word recognition in beginning reading instruction have raged for generations. The goal has been to acquire automatic skills for recoding written language into speech. At this time, a popular theory suggests that phonics is better than the look-and-say method; however the evidence does not support this…

This review examines non-North American ideas about reading difficulties. Noted is the success of such tutorial programs as Reading Recovery, used in Australia, the United States, and New Zealand. The potential of a Vygotskian perspective on assessment and teaching for children experiencing reading difficulties is outlined. (Author/DB)

An effort to lay the foundation for the preparation of reading programs which will match the social and linguistic background of lower-class children, in particular children of the nation's black ghettos, is made in this paper. The paper consists of five sections. The first section discusses the interconnection of social, geographic, and stylistic…

The debate among major theorists of the whole-language approach (Kenneth Goodman and Frank Smith) and their critics (e.g., Philip Gough) is summarized. It concludes that the Goodman/Smith theoretical position has not stood the test of time, though some of their instructional recommendations may be valid for other reasons. (Author/DB)

Traditionally, reading instruction has emphasized the visual-sound correspondences in language. The illusion that words can be "sounded-out" letter by letter and word by word to produce meaning needs to be re-evaluated according to the psycholinguistic nature of the reading process. Some nonvisual aspects of reading which are…

This document reviews the changes in reading in Denmark from 1934 to 1976 and discusses factors that brought about the changes. The paper indicates the importance of the library in reading development and notes that children use the library more extensively today than they did earlier. Changes in society and their effects on the educational system…

Intended for use in the planning of reading programs for Georgia schools, this research review was undertaken to assist in identifying knowledge about reading and to derive implications for reading instruction within the state's schools. The report is organized into six sections. The first deals with the elementary level and covers the areas of…

Papers collected in this volume were presented at the Fifth Annual Blumberg Symposium on Research in Early Childhood Education, held at Johns Hopkins University in 1974. Selections include "Alexia" (D. Frank Benson), "Young Children's Expectations for Reading" (Doris R. Entwisle), "Relations between Acquisition of…