In light of the recently published Common Core State Standards Initiative, public school curriculum has once again come under scrutiny. While curriculum debates have taken place since the very beginnings of public schooling in the United States, too few have taken more than a passing notice of the textbooks that, in many cases, comprise the…

The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which the content and recommendations in recently published early language and literacy methods textbooks may support early childhood teachers in learning to provide vocabulary instruction for young children. We completed a content analysis of 9 textbooks with coding at the sentence level.…

Over the past 50 years, substantial changes have occurred in the texts used for beginning reading instruction. This article analyzes four perspectives that have most influenced these texts in the United States over this period and the changes in these texts in relation to those in the nation's demographics and young children's literacy-related…

Although vocabulary instruction is a pressing need for postsecondary reading instructors, a minimal amount of current postsecondary scholarship addresses this need, and almost no current scholarship addresses the textbook tradition of morphemic analysis (MA). The present article reviews the literature on MA instruction and argues for teaching MA…

This study of English as a second language (ESL) reading textbooks investigates cohesion in reading passages from 27 textbooks. The guiding research questions were whether and how cohesion differs across textbooks written for beginning, intermediate, and advanced second language readers. Using a computational tool called Coh-Metrix, textual…

If Christian schools desire students to achieve higher-level thinking, then the textbooks that teachers use should reflect such thinking. Using Risner's (1987) methodology, raters classified questions from two Christian publishers' fifth grade reading textbooks based on the revised Bloom's taxonomy (Anderson et al., 2001). The questions in the A…

The study explores the social practice of vocabulary learning by examining vocabulary teaching techniques employed by teachers, the vocabulary learning strategies (VLSs) identified by students as most useful and the ones they felt most competent in using when reading and teachers' and students' attitudes towards learning vocabulary through…

Concludes that individual professional textbooks on secondary reading do not necessarily reflect the extant information base or state-of-the-art in secondary reading. (GT)

Examines the quality of basal readers and textbooks, discusses some of the forces affecting textbook quality and selection, and offers suggestions for coping with less-than-adequate reading materials. (FL)

Analyzes some problems that can make beginning basal stories difficult for young readers to understand and offers suggestions for ways teachers can help alleviate the problems. (FL)

Reviews the literature criticizing school textbooks for sexism and suggests new series deleting sexist stereotypes should be developed. (RB)

Identifies types of reading passages that tend to be troublesome for poor readers who have difficulty in evaluating and revising their initial hypotheses about the content of a passage. Offers teaching strategies to help these students. (FL)

A study examined basal readers and trade books in terms of reading ease as estimated by readability formulas and the incidence of figurative language. Based on an earlier study, the study had three major goals: to (1) assess and compare two reading series ("A" and "B") at each of two grade levels; (2) assess and compare…

A study involved a comparison of the "Miami Linguistic Readers" and the "Holt Basic Reading Series." It was hypothesized that there is no difference between the "Miami Linguistic Readers" and the "Holt Basic Reading Series" in vocabulary load, word recognition, and comprehension requirements. An analysis of…

Examines British and American 19th-century classroom readers and their treatment of death. Quantitatively analyzes several series, using a computer database for each volume. Finds that school readers reflected the Victorians' preoccupation with death and helped socialize children into the Victorian sense that death was ever at hand. (PA)