Examines existence and placement of main ideas in non-fiction best-sellers. Concludes that writers of popular non-fiction use main ideas and place these ideas in prominent positions. Offers support for teaching main idea in reading classes. (RS)

A study examined the opportunities provided by several types of text for beginning readers to learn about three aspects of written English: (1) consistent, common letter-sound patterns; (2) the most frequent words; and (3) the contexts of sentences and texts. Results indicate that texts based on high-frequency words give beginning readers ample…

A pilot study examined to what degree answers that students supply on basal reader workbook pages are integrated with understanding the words in the story or with understanding the story itself. The sample consisted of 27 workbook pages from 5 fourth-grade basal reading programs with a 1989 copyright date. Two simple content analyses were applied…

Explains eight categories of friendly text features: text organization, signaling, discourse consistency, cohesion, explication, conceptual density, metadiscourse, and instructional devices. Extratext determinants of readability (reader, goal, teacher) are also examined. Within the context of two models of reading, the interaction of these…

Suggests picture books are made more difficult for kids to predict, to make sense of, and to learn from by fitting them into the didactic framework of basals. Discusses the picture book genre. Compares the original version of "Ira Sleeps Over" to the basal version. Examines in detail how picture books are made to fit into a basal…