This paper on the nature of instruction as it has been informed by instructional research is organized into two major sections. The background section describes the origin and evolution of the research that has been conducted into teacher response toward reading miscues, while the second section relates this research to other classroom research…

A study examined the effects of teacher feedback on the oral reading performance of nine low-ability second grade readers. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of three treatment sequence conditions. A single-subject format was incorporated by using a Latin Square design for presenting the three treatment conditions--graphophonemic immediate,…

This paper discusses the performance of 20 disabled secondary readers, on Carol Chomsky's tests of five stages of language development. These results, which indicated a low level of lingusitic competence for 18 of the 20 subjects, are reviewed against related studies. Analyses of the reading of these subjects indicated that they made most of their…

A two-part study investigated the prevalence of unrehearsed oral reading and compared reading fluency for rehearsed and unrehearsed reading passages. In the first part of the study, a total of 21 teachers were interviewed and 24 classrooms were observed. Results indicated that by far the most prevalent practice in basal reading programs is the…

Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA) is a curriculum tool for use in the preservice preparation of reading teachers. The questioning procedure in RMA is designed to encourage consideration of reading as a meaning-getting process rather than as a process of seeking accuracy or perfection. The technique, which involves the teachers in analyzing a…

To determine whether miscue analysis instruction changed their perceptions of the seriousness of certain kinds of errors in children's oral reading, 60 undergraduate and graduate students were given an error survey to complete before and after being given such instruction. Each of the 32 items of the survey consisted of a pair of sentences, with…

This study investigated the success rate and the type of teachers' responses to miscues during a six-month tutoring program. Teachers gave prompts, or cues, to help each child recognize unknown words, concentrating on behaviors hypothesized to encourage pupil success and independence in decoding. Previous research had shown that inservice teachers…

The findings from a study of five students undertaken to determine how unskilled college writers compose, whether their writing processes can be analyzed in a systematic manner, and what an increased understanding of those processes suggests about the nature of composing and about the manner in which writing is taught are presented in this paper.…

Intended to help reading teachers develop and demonstrate mastery of diagnostic or remediation skills prior to or with application in a real classroom, this handbook provides simulated materials for use within a course or staff development program to supplement lectures, discussions, readings, demonstrations, and films. Following an introduction,…

Noting that the verbal interactions that transpire between teacher and student in the classroom setting are central to the instructional process, this paper offers reading teachers a systematic means of examining their own interactive patterns in the context of oral reading instruction. In addition, it provides teachers with a way of inspecting…

Many effective classroom teachers profess reluctance to use miscue analysis, either because they experience interference by their previous use of informal reading inventory procedures or because they find the procedures for miscue analysis too involved for use in the classroom. Such teachers need a brief explanation of the psycholinguistic…

This paper considers the place of one-to-one teacher/student oral reading interactions in reading instruction. Maintaining that there is an important function for such interactions in learning to read, the paper analyzes one learning process in these interactions--attention to errors--and argues that in oral reading instruction, attention to…

The failure of many beginning reading students to become efficient or enthusiastic readers is due to mistaken views of the reading process that cause teachers to stress isolated reading skills and error-free oral reading, rather than focusing on children's ability to read with understanding. Teachers who want to teach differently must take an…

A study investigated ways of establishing links between different methods of reading instruction, children's conceptualizations of the reading process, and children's actual reading behavior. Two instruments were used to assess the relationships between the three variables: a revised version of "The Reading Miscue Inventory" and…