As reading is vital to success in life and opens the door to nearly all other learning opportunities, it is essential that educators understand why students with learning how to read. Therefore, it is key for both professionals and researchers to establish their own approaches to assist those with reading difficulties. "Developing Effective…

This research investigated factors that influence the implementation levels of evidence-based comprehension strategy instruction (CSI) among K-3 teachers. An explanatory design was chosen to gather and probe the data. Quantitative data were gathered via a mailed survey distributed through a representative sample of the 40 school districts (through…

Notes that reading research has advanced from notions that reading is a visual-perception task of word recognition and decoding to more precise psycho- and neurolinguistic models of language and literacy. Concludes that reading is a skill that develops to an automatic level depending on the degree to which the individual can access phonemic and…

Focuses on inferential processes in reading and the question of whether those processes are automatic. Examines the importance of inference generation during reading comprehension. Describes research that investigates which inferences appear to be automatic. Discusses characteristics of skilled reading that are related to the automaticity of…

Fourth graders who were good readers (N=95) and poor readers (N=27) were given tests of syntactic competence, vocabulary, and auditory and reading comprehension. Scores on the auditory and reading comprehension tests were significantly correlated. Poor readers performed significantly poorer on the syntactic test, but results did not support the…

Examines problems involved in defining reading comprehension. Suggests reexamining comprehension testing, rethinking the missions of reading instruction, and helping students find, formulate, and solve problems for which using written language provides a solution. (TJ)

Reviews recent literature on automaticity, defining the criteria that distinguish automatic processing from non-automatic processing, and describing modern theories of the underlying mechanisms. Focuses on evidence from studies of reading and draws implications from theory and data for practical issues in teaching reading. Suggests that…

Explores whether training in mental imagery can improve text comprehension in good and poor nine-year-old comprehenders. Finds that a three-session program of training in imagery benefited the poor, but not the good, comprehenders. Discusses results in relation to possible causes of children's comprehension difficulties. (MG)

Outlines seven basic concepts regarding teachers' understanding of the comprehension process and proposes several instructional strategies based on the concepts, each of which actively involves children in reading. (FL)

Suggests that reading theorists who neglect to treat context frequently produce distorted views of how reading occurs. (MKM)

Reports on a psycholinguistic investigation of a 10-year-old, nonautistic hyperlexic on tasks of written and auditory presentations of single words, sentences, and text. Finds good development of both phonological and lexical reading mechanisms. Finds a significant dissociation between reading accuracy and reading comprehension and also between…

Determines whether mental imagery could be used as a metacognitive reading comprehension strategy by deaf elementary-level children. Finds that when encouraged to engage in mental imagery, students exhibited four qualities of thinking (recollection, representation, inference, and evaluation) during and after reading that revealed how they were…

Recent studies have offered support for a constructive view of sentence memory in children, based on their preference in recognition errors for true inferences, which can be drawn from input sentences, over false inferences. However, with the materials used in these studies, this preference may reflect responding either on the basis of semantic or…

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…

Explores children's predicting and inferencing strategies for understanding written materials by analyzing an example of one second grader's oral reading. Discusses theory of reading comprehension processes, as well as how teachers can develop student's predicting and inferencing abilities at word, sentence and suprasentential levels. (RH)