Describes the interrelationship of reading and writing and proposes a full-school program for reading and writing development that builds on the full range of personal use of written language. (JL)

Provides a brief review of research concerning the relationship between reading and writing, and of instructional strategies suggested by that research. (AEA)

To test the effects of selective attention on decoding skills, 23 children (grades 2 through 6) with learning disabilities were studied. Results showed that treatment directly improved the ability of the experimental groups to transfer spelling patterns learned in isolation to unknown words containing those patterns and improved the ability of Ss…

Argues that teachers can determine the instructional frameworks which can empower students to understand more about their own learning. Describes activities (learning logs, directed reading-thinking activities) that develop higher level thinking skills using writing, reading, and reasoning. Concludes that such activities facilitate students'…

Describes an informal assessment procedure that uses think alouds (readers' verbal self-reports about their thinking processes) to obtain information about how they attempt to construct meaning from text. (MG)

Describes the Inferential Training Technique (ITT), a modified cloze procedure and self-monitoring checklist focusing on the inferential process. Notes that this strategy improves reading comprehension and inferencing skills, and can be applied to content area reading. Provides a sample cloze passage, inferential questions, and worksheet guide for…

Discusses guided reading as an approach that teachers can use to help young students better comprehend what they are reading. Notes that guided reading allows teachers to talk, think, and read through a text with children, offering questions, comments, and prompts to the children to stimulate their interest and understanding. (MDM)

A study involving four male beginning readers with learning disabilities compared the effects on gains in fluency of two types of mastery criteria. One required students to reread a passage until they demonstrated 3 successive improvements; the other required rereading until 90 correct words per minute were reached. Both were successful;…

Investigates the influence that instruction and the developmental stage of learning to read have on the reading concepts of first graders from skill-based and literature-based classrooms. Finds both groups exhibited high interest in learning and knowing words but that the literature group differed in their heightened metacognitive understandings,…

Compares the effects of two prereading instructional treatments on students' comprehension of narrative and expository texts. Indicates that the teacher-directed condition is more effective than the interactive condition at promoting comprehension, and that both treatment conditions are superior to no prereading instruction at all. (MG)

Examines how secondary school students in Singapore construct knowledge through reading and understanding their science textbooks in an attempt to discover whether early or later pedagogic interventions in the learning process are more helpful. (Author/VWL)

This article describes an enjoyable, intuitively grasped, learn-by-doing activity that uses general to increasingly specific sentences describing a mystery topic. This technique helps teachers assist students to bridge the gap between foundational skills--such as phonemic awareness, letter patterns, and sight words--and the acquisition of a…

In her previous books, "Literacy Work Stations and Practice with Purpose," Debbie Diller showed teachers how to productively occupy the "rest of the class" while meeting with small groups. Now Debbie turns her attention to the groups themselves and the teacher's role in small-group instruction. "Making the Most of Small Groups" grapples with…

This guide will help teach phonemic awareness to Pre K-3 students. It presents phonemic awareness as a sophisticated branch of phonological awareness through interactive activities that allows the student to succeed in learning the sounds represented by the letters of the alphabet. The book is designed to provide easy-to-follow suggestions for:…