This article examines how a second-grader demonstrates that reading is not about decoding letters and words in linear order but is a more complex activity involving the reader's decisions with respect to several aspects of their knowledge of their language and how comprehension is key to transacting with texts. The paper observes and documents the…

As a special education teacher, locating effective techniques for improving and tracking her students' reading progress became an ongoing task. During the author's first year in that role, she realized immediately that finding an effective approach for improving reading was crucial for her students. A professor introduced her peers and her to…

A pervasive finding from research on teaching and classroom learning is that a low rate of error on classroom tasks is associated with large year to year gains in achievement, particularly for reading in the primary grades. The finding of a negative relationship between error rate, especially rate of oral reading errors, and gains in reading…

The diagnostic and prescriptive strategies presented in this paper are based on the assumption that reading is language, reading is understanding, reading is not an exact process, reading is responding, and reading is enjoyable. The principles of diagnosis based on these assumptions are that diagnosis will be based on the goals of the reading…

The progress and problems of five Spanish-speaking fourth graders who have learned to read only in English are traced. An attempt is made to ascertain the relationship between oral fluency in Spanish and English and reading ability in English, the effects of dialect-based miscues on reading comprehension, and the types of reading strategies these…

Suggests that, in the majority of the aspects of the reading process examined, there was a statistically significant interaction between illustration and difficulty levels. Finds that reading performance in the illustrated conditions was superior to that in the unillustrated conditions at the lower level of difficulty. (JD)

A study was conducted to determine whether word length and sentence position influence the likelihood that a child will acknowledge that a word has disrupted comprehension of a reading passage. In the first task, third and fifth grade skilled and less-skilled readers read 16 short paragraphs containing nonsense words and reported whether the…

Examines the strategies first grade students use when reading two types of materials--basal and student-authored. Finds that children used more efficient strategies and had better comprehension when reading student-authored stories. (MM)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 23 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: relationships among attitudes, intelligence, and reading achievement; the purposes and processes of reading as described by elementary school children; evaluating…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 19 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) children's approaches to reading tasks; (2) methods of teaching word recognition to aphasic/severely language disordered students; (3) intentional forgetting…

Extending Beginning Reading was a research project based at the School of Education, University of Manchester, England, from September 1973 to December 1977. The project, aimed at helping readers seven years and older improve their reading skills, is detailed in this book, in which most of the seven sections contain implications for teachers. The…

To weigh the negative effects of "primerese" against its supposedly improved readability, a study compared the reading of controlled basal stories with that of the same stories minimally rewritten into more natural language. Participants were 64 white, lower middle class first grade students selected from five classrooms (all with basal…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: semantic constructivity in children's comprehension; text-based inferences generated by children in reading written discourse; a review of reading comprehension…