The conclusions and recommendations drawn from a 7-year study of the Initial Teaching Alphabet (i/t/a) made by the Reading Research Unit of London University are reported. The British research showed conclusively that traditional orthography (TO) is a major handicap for teachers and students of reading. Students taught with i/t/a made…

Concludes that a grapho-syntactic organization that divided sentences into meaningful units and random units was comprehended significantly better by both good and poor comprehenders than was the regular paragraph format found in basal readers. (FL)

Four studies used the theoretically based understanding of comprehension developed by W. Kintsch and T. A. van Dijk to look for processes that might undergo development as a child becomes more practiced and skilled in reading so that an understanding of these processes might become the basis for reading remediation programs. The first three…

A study was conducted to determine whether students who mapped prior and post knowledge of a basal reading lesson would achieve higher scores on a comprehension test and write better summaries of those stories than would students who received traditional basal reading instruction. Subjects, 30 fifth grade students, participated in either a…

A commonly held belief about reading instruction in the elementary grades is that students must first learn to read so that they will then utilize their reading skill to learn from written language and to acquire new ideas. Consequently most of the instructional time in the primary grades is spent in teaching students how to recognize words and…