In many U.S. states, legislation seeks to define effective instruction for beginning readers, creating an urgent need to turn to scholars who are knowledgeable about ongoing reading research. This mixed-methods study considers the extent to which recognized literacy experts agreed with recommendations about instruction that were included on a…

Provides a description of a visual/reading difficulty, the interventions used to circumvent learning difficulties, and the compensations used to accommodate to a regular classroom system. Suggests that students with visual deficiencies can demonstrate learning strategies and critical-thinking skills through proper diagnosis and one-to-one coaching…

An experiment was conducted on 13 normal and 13 retarded readers, matched for age, IQ, and vocabulary. Recent findings suggested that reading retardates had difficulty in the cross-modal transfer of information from the auditory to the visual modality (e.g., converting auditory taps into visual dot patterns). Prior research by the present authors…

Presents a case study of a fourth-grade boy who was an active, intelligent boy who was not coping well with reading and writing in school. Discusses observations of, and conversations with, the boy and his parents in their home. Demonstrates the importance of educators' having a family perspective on students' language and literacy development.…

A study investigated the effects of induced mental imagery upon the comprehension of oral versus written discourse for above and below average readers. A secondary purpose of the study was to determine, through a follow-up interview, the students' ability to induce mental imagery. Sixty-three sixth grade students with above or below average…

Reports on a study that suggests that eight- through ten-year-old disabled readers may differ from normal readers, both in their ability to recall sequences of letters and in their ability to shorten the recall task by perceiving recognizable spelling patterns as meaningful groups. (GW)

Training to self-monitor reading comprehension was undertaken with 120 learning disabled eighth and ninth graders and normally achieving sixth graders. It was hypothesized that insufficient metacomprehension is one possible cause underlying learning disabled adolescents' comprehension problems. (Author/SEW)

Results reported by Leinhardt, Zigmond, and Cooley (1981) have been interpreted as support for increased silent reading in classroom reading instruction. G. Leinhardt and colleagues examined a causal model of classroom processes influencing reading achievement and found that time spent in silent, rather than oral, reading was positively related to…

Reexamines the persistent reading failure of black students in light of current research in an effort to encourage new efforts to discover the real cause or causes of the problem and to provide solutions. (FL)

This study offers an alternative to traditional notions of scaffolding for reading comprehension by tracing the evolution of a fifth-grade small group literature conversation in which the teacher sought to displace himself as "primary knower" (Berry, 1981) in the conversation. The study examines how the teacher shared evaluation with his…

A study examined a reading strategy--story retelling--to determine whether it would enhance comprehension, vocabulary, and develop a sense of competency in students who lacked reading strategies. Subjects of the study were 10 learning disabled children, ages 12-14. The study was conducted over an 8-week period. Two samples were created using…

Gives advanced and novice readers in grade one and older disabled readers nonword reading and spelling tasks. Finds that disabled readers read as many nonwords and spelled as many words as beginning readers, indicating equivalent alphabetic knowledge. Finds that disabled readers took significantly more trials to read 16 target words, indicating…

A study of 103 second, third, and fourth grade students investigated relationships among cognitive styles and reading comprehension. Each subject was individually tested using four different instruments to assess four cognitive styles: (1) field-independence/dependence (ability to locate a simple figure--concept--hidden in a complex field), (2)…

The first of a series providing reviews, syntheses (empirical and rhetorical), and reports of reading research, the chapters in this volume treat the question, "What does a child have to know (or be able to do) in order to learn to read?" The book begins with an in-depth logical analysis in historical perspective of the concept of reading…

The difficulties children have when learning to read vary from child to child and from age to age. Some learning variables transfer as a child develops so that skills acquired in early learning stages transfer to more mature stages of development. However, the abilities that transfer and produce effects at one stage of learning may be different…