Provides a rationale for using fiction and drama to promote critical thinking. Presents a sample grid used to record answers to and interpretations of six questions which can be used in class discussion to bring out critical thinking dispositions, such as the ability to determine whether a generalization is warranted. (RS)

Presents excerpts from eight of the many manuscripts received in response to a call for papers about whether other teachers could become like Nancie Atwell by reading her book "In the Middle." Results indicate that junior high teachers all over the country are emulating, adapting, and extending her methods. (RS)

Discusses how reading aloud to students improves their reading competencies, including language processes, reading and listening skills, and reading motivation. Concludes that reading aloud should be a regular part of a daily classroom schedule. (MM)

Active comprehension, a strategy used in the United States to teach Spanish language basal reading, is discussed. The strategy emphasizes a process approach to comprehension instruction. (20 references) (JL)

Investigates the relation between phonological awareness, sound-to-letter mapping knowledge, and printed word learning in novice five-year-old readers. Explores effects of visual memory and of teaching methods. Finds mental representations of printed words are more easily formed by beginners who are able to match at least some of the phonological…

Argues that a fresh look at some aspects of reader response theories could have a revitalizing effect on classroom practices. Suggests that for students to respond to texts, they will have to make more use of what happens while they read. Exemplifies some reader response strategies through the author's own responses to a short story. Suggests…

Describes Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA), an instructional strategy that invites readers to reflect on their own reading process. Explains several variations on the RMA strategy. (SR)

In order to make predictions about a text, students must have prior knowledge or experiences about the topic and a means or a reason to retrieve this latent information and knowledge. The Imagine, Elaborate, Predict, and Confirm (IEPC) strategy takes the predictive process back to its origins in the imagination and extends it throughout the…

As a special education teacher, locating effective techniques for improving and tracking her students' reading progress became an ongoing task. During the author's first year in that role, she realized immediately that finding an effective approach for improving reading was crucial for her students. A professor introduced her peers and her to…

US government mandates to implement intensive phonics instruction in elementary classrooms invoke an alleged scientific superiority of this approach over more meaning-centered models. But curiously absent from this scientific enterprise is a study of the phonics system itself. Advocates of intensive phonics have not demonstrated that the commonly…

Teachers must know and understand kids, their language and the reading process in order to help them. (Editor)

For many years, methods of teaching reading have been based upon a mechanistic paradigm that something can be understood by reducing it to its most basic parts. This scientific paradigm has led to several misconceptions about reading: (1) that comprehension can be reduced to separately identifiable parts, (2) that meaning is contained within the…

Research into the reading process has shaped an understanding of how readers "make meaning" when they are engaged in a reading activity. This research has highlighted a learning triad--the reader, the text, and the context (or learning environment)--that interactively affects the manner in which the student will comprehend a particular…

Assuming that although the pre-operational child generates syntactic utterances, it cannot be inferred that he can comprehend the process of analyzing or synthesizing words or utterances as specimens, it would follow that trying to teach pre-operational children to read by decomposing words or sentences, on the assumption that words and the…