Attention is given to spoken language as an important base for reading success, followed by a description of the oral language characteristics of school age children and a consideration of the match between these characteristics and the materials used to teach reading. (Author/JC)

Children who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and speak in nonstandard dialects should not be made to feel inferior but should be listened to. (JH)

Reviews research using sentence length as a factor in predicting readability and discusses the possibility of sentence complexity as a more accurate variable. (TO)

Describes five videotapes drawn from a conference on teacher education. The tapes discuss alternative ways of viewing current problems in reading and language development, the "Breakthrough to Literacy" program developed in Great Britain, language codes, language as a resource, and language as a part of human behavior. (FL)

As a result of a program of research about cognitive processes involved in learning to read and write among 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year old-children, this book attempts to get teacher-researchers to think through the implications of recent insights into literacy and literacy learning. The first section examines instructional assumptions; proposes a new…

Anaphora, a linguistic structure that refers to previously mentioned or implied text, has been implicated as a possible cause of reading comprehension difficulty among children. Reading research has focused on the surface structures of anaphora (pronouns and noun demonstratives, for example) and has viewed comprehension of anaphora as a language…

This speech is based on a theory earlier proposed by the author that orthographic presentation of English is much like the abstract base of language which an individual uses in forming strategies for reading. Thus, his ability to read depends upon his facility with his language. An important implication for schools is that, given this theory, all…

Phonological awareness is thought to become increasingly analytic during early childhood. This study examines whether the proposed developmental sequence (syllable[right arrow]onset-rime[right arrow]phoneme) varies according to the characteristics of a child's native language. Experiment 1 compares the phonological segmentation skills of English…

This book is designed specifically for preservice and inservice teachers who wish to improve their reading-language arts instruction. Topics discussed in the sixteen chapters are: the reading-language teacher's role in an age of change; a communication framework; dynamics of language; children's language development; reading-language programs;…

This document reports an investigation of the developmental changes in the use of certain syntactic structures by white, monolingual, middle class five- and seven-year-olds, and of the differences between the syntax of young children and that used in beginning reading textbooks. Approximately half of the publication presents the methods and…

The reading instruction experiment described in this report is based on the theory that, if a child learns to talk without formal instruction solely by being exposed to language and if written language is to be considered as an independent system, a child could learn to read at the same age and in the same way as he is learning to talk, solely by…

The experiment described in this report investigates two basic questions concerning beginning reading instruction to speakers of nonstandard dialects. 1--Will learning to read be facilitated if the primary reading material is phrased in the actual word patterns and grammatical structure used by the children in their oral speech? 2--Will learning…