This article considers the ramifications of early reading failure within the context of J. Chall's five-stage model of reading development: (1) initial decoding, (2) fluency, (3) reading for meaning, (4) relationships and viewpoints, and (5) synthesis. Instructional implications include learning disabled students' special need for good instruction…

The effectiveness of small group instruction in test taking skills was evaluated with 85 learning disabled or behaviorally disordered students in grades four to six. Trained students scored significantly higher than nontrained students on Stanford Achievement subtests of word study skills and mathematics concepts. (DB)

Notes the problems young readers often have in decoding words of three syllables or more that appear in their textbooks and offers three solutions to the problem. (JC)

This study assessed the influence of reading ability and difficulty of material on types of oral reading errors made by 42 second-grade children. Overall, types of errors changed as the material became more difficult. The interactions between reading ability and difficulty level were also significant. (Author/BS)

Investigated children's use of context to facilitate word recognition and comprehension-monitoring processes in oral reading of connected prose as a function of grade level and decoding skill. Found no overall contextual facilitation of word recognition accuracy; however, less skilled decoders were helped by context in decoding some content words.…

Reports results of four experiments testing whether syllable structure affects children's performance in phonemic analysis tasks and in other reading related tasks. The experiments were motivated by theories that syllables consist of an onset (initial consonant or consonant cluster) and a rime (vowel and any following consonants). (AS/Author)

A practical new text with ideas that can immediately be put to use in the classroom. This book goes beyond a thematic link between reading and music to an examination of those skills that are directly parallel in music learning and text reading. Including instructional examples, it provides specific strategies for music and reading teachers to…

This is the second of two issues focused on teaching beginning reading skills to adults--both native and non-native English speakers. According to the latest research in reading, one of the best strategies for improving reading skills is systematic, explicit instruction in decoding skills or phonics. Although many critics have argued that the…

Thirty six EFL freshman students at the College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia were given a dictation, a listening comprehension test and a decoding test. The purpose of the study was to find out whether EFL freshmen students' spelling ability correlates with their listening comprehension and decoding…

Good and poor readers, 15- and 16-year-olds and adult literacy students, were compared in their ability to produce graphemic representations for four specific phonemes. Good readers were significantly better than poor readers at representing the critical phonemes, but intentional ambiguity had a similar effect on all. (MSE)

Reexamines two current, popularly held views about reading: the relative importance of word perception versus the reader's attention to the larger syntactic and semantic redundancies of the text. Some recent findings suggest the seriousness of the difficulty for those who cannot read high-frequency simple words. (Author/DB)

Reports on a study that investigated the transfer effects produced by three different word recognition strategies among children in the second, third, and fourth grades. (HOD)

Third- and fifth-grade children were presented with a picture-naming interference task to examine the effects of printing words in mixed typecase on children's automatic word processing. (Author/MP)

Neither remedial nor nonremedial readers indicated willingness to skip words but remedial readers were less willing to skip over letters in a word. Remedial readers also showed a heavy emphasis on phonics. (Author)