This article conveys one practitioner's career-long journey related to teaching reading. The author gained valuable information from relevant research reports regarding the keys to effective reading instruction and has learned even more while implementing a systematic approach to teaching reading as a volunteer tutor.

The annual What's Hot, What's Not in Literacy Survey has helped to define the literacy agenda and highlight topics receiving attention in the field over the last 15 years. The ebb and flow of the field of literacy often shifts with changes in legislation, policy, and curricula. As a result, what was formerly hot may subsequently receive less…

This article describes the need for, and the structure and contents of, a reading program to help support children disadvantaged by reading difficulties. The program, delivered by trained and supported volunteers, lasts for 15 weeks. It uses a novel dual approach which aims to improve students' reading skills and simultaneously enhance their…

Poverty most likely will always be a concern in the United States, particularly in at-risk populations of the public schools. Many students in poverty enter public schools behind in academic and social skills due to a lack of quality early learning experiences. Regular education teachers work diligently to catch these children up in vital skills;…

Over the last 11 years, the Literacy Action Center, a traditional community-based adult literacy organization that focuses on educating English-speaking adults with low functioning literacy skills, has seen a transformation in the enthusiasm of the learners. The Literacy Action Center is also a learner-centered organization driven by the wants and…

We obtained data from 124 volunteer instructors in adult literacy, using an instrument developed to assess what the volunteers knew about providing reading instruction to adults. Results showed that volunteers with bachelor's degrees or higher and those who had teacher's certificates were significantly more knowledgeable about providing reading…

This manual offers practical help for the nonprofessional volunteer tutor. Part 1, "Diagnostic Techniques for Tutors," allows the tutor to find out what problems interfere with the ability of a given child to read so that the tutor can plan activities which deal with each particular difficulty. Part 2, "Developing Learning Readiness Skills,"…

Proceedings of a 3-day workshop are reported. The workshop, stressing the need for and the role of volunteers in the "Right-to-Read" program, was sponsored by the Washington Technical Institute under an EPDA grant. Topics for major addresses included the role of the volunteer, training of volunteers and the responsibility for such training, and a…

This guidebook is specifically designed for volunteers involved in helping children learn to read. Originally published in 1965, this new edition focuses on reading education as it is expected to be in the 1980s. The information included takes a volunteer from the first meeting through diagnosis and treatment of specific problems to feedback,…

The purpose of this paper is to describe the efficacy of early literacy interventions and to discuss possible roles for volunteer tutors in helping prevent reading difficulties within the Response to Intervention process. First, we describe a landmark study that evaluated the impact of primary classroom instruction on reducing the proportion of…

The effects of a voluntary summer reading intervention with teacher and parent scaffolding were investigated in an experimental study. A total of 24 teachers and 400 children in Grades 3, 4, and 5 were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: control, books only, books with oral reading scaffolding, and books with oral reading and…

This handbook grew out of the experiences of the teachers and students at the Read/Write/Now Adult Learning Center, a community-based literacy program in Springfield, Massachusetts. It is both a documentation of the experiences of the program and a guide for teachers. The four sections of the handbook contain a number of modules, each of which…

A pilot program, established at Griffin Creek School (Medford, Oregon) from September 1970 to June 1971, consisted of five Laubach-trained volunteer reading tutors, an experimental group of five fifth- and sixth-grade boys, and a control group of eighteen boys and girls in a regular classroom. The experimental boys, reading at a second- or…

This booklet is intended for the volunteer reading teacher who may not be familiar with methods for teaching reading, the materials available, or the unique needs of the disadvantaged child. Chapter 1, "Children, Reading, and You," clarifies the goals of the volunteer and explains some of the students' needs. Chapter 2, "The First Meeting,"…

This study describes the interactions of three adult-child reading partnerships in a program that matches corporate volunteers with "at risk" students for weekly hour-long story reading sessions. Using discourse analysis within a sociocultural framework, the researcher identified variation in the way these partners were constructing the act and…