Argues that reading professionals should not reject or neglect theory merely because it is old and offers Jack Holmes' Substrata Factor Theory as a case in point. Reviews the statistical, neurological, and psychological models in Holmes' theory and points out their potential for stimulating further theoretical thought. (FL)

Describes the difficulties children face in learning the special language used to talk about reading and its relation to speech. (DD)

Suggests that studying reading and reading instruction in other languages and other countries may help us better understand the processes of reading, and notes that there is a need for more college courses on the topic of comparative reading. (MKM)

Discusses whether the learning of separate subskills is a prerequisite for learning to read and whether the reading process actually is made up of many different skills. (FL)

General comparisons are made between American and British reading instruction, and outstanding commonalities and differences between the two countries are emphasized. Both, for example, believe in the necessity for careful early instruction, and both believe in the importance of reading as a skill. Differences exist in attitudes toward learning to…

Cognitive confusion is the common state of young persons in regard to concepts of units of writing. In the past 10 years, research has accumulated to show that all children pass through the important stage of initial cognitive confusion in learning to read. Children often confuse "writing" with "drawing,""letter" with "number," and so on.…

Part One of this book deals with theoretical considerations in the cross-national comparisons of language and reading instruction and achievement. Discussions of the scope and methodological problems of such research, bases for comparison, attitudinal and cultural variations, teacher preparation and organization variables, the varied linguistic…

The research being published in Britain regarding reading readiness is reviewed in this monograph. The factors teachers should take into account when planning prereading programs and determining when a child is ready to read are presented. The various aspects of reading readiness that are discussed include: (1) physiological factors, such as…

The cognitive clarity theory may be stated quite simply and briefly: (1) Learning to read involved applying general intellectual abilities to the task. (2) Reading is usually a silent activity, and there are very few outward signs of what the behavior involves. (3) Children do not know the basic concepts involved in thinking about the tasks of…

Based on the idea that mastery of reading is a complex problem to be solved by a child, the author discusses the learning-to-read process as a series of discoveries of solutions to subproblems, all of which are then ordered into a total system. As a child's attempted solutions approximate more closely the reality of each aspect of the reading…

The cognitive clarity theory focuses on the learning-to-read process rather than on the reading process of the mature reader. The cognitive clarity theory already seems to show some power in explaining some puzzling findings in reading research. Some examples of these paradoxes are: earlier letter-name knowledge is highly correlated with later…

The aim of this study was to test a hypothesis derived from the Cognitive Clarity Theory which compares Indian and non-Indian children in two localities of British Columbia. It was hypothesized that, in comparison with Indian children, the non-Indian children would show significantly superior performance on objective tests of cognitive clarity in…

Reading teachers vary in their teaching methods for reading instruction, usually emphasizing either the meaningful functions (meaning) or the technical features (coding) of written language. This paper reviews literature on the meaning/coding dichotomy and focuses on a "cognitive clarity theory" that stresses linguistic awareness and…

Examination of cognitive prerequisites for the acquisition of reading skills identified two kinds of conceptual representations of language activities--functional and technical concepts. English-as-a-second-language students can transfer these concepts to second-language literacy, but attention must be given to orthographic coding principles of…