This book addresses the problems of reading and the teaching of reading in the United States, where 43% of children test below grade level in reading and 42 million adults are functionally illiterate. The book contends that both the whole language approach and phonics are not viable methods of teaching reading and explains why. It argues that the…

This portfolio contains a literacy profile form for teachers to record students' progress, a reading folder to collect information on what students have read, a place to collect writing samples, and a listening/speaking/viewing folder. The literacy profile in the portfolio contains a chart to record baseline data, mid-year, and summative data for…

This research presents the results of a 10-week qualitative case study that followed the journey of a limited literacy, grade six student as he progressed through a 10-week, one-on-one intensive literacy intervention. A limited literacy student is defined as a student, who has been identified as functioning two or more years behind their peers in…

This practicum was designed to use directed reading thinking activity strategies to teach reading comprehension skills to middle grades language arts students who frequently failed to make passing scores in reading comprehension exercises. The program included three specific strategies. The first strategy was to teach the students higher-order…

This paper describes development of a bank of interventions in response to individual student needs identified by Student Study Teams (SSTs) in the Horry County (South Carolina) school district. It also describes the training of SST members in the selection, application, and monitoring of each intervention. Following a survey that identified basic…

Indicates that college students make use of word length and shape information to decode text and that the context of a passage affects students' knowledge of the syntactic structure and semantic content of that passage. (AEA)

Reports that teaching educable mentally handicapped children to compare unknown words to words they already have in their sight vocabularies seems to improve their reading abilities. (FL)

A cross-section method was used to study the developmental changes in elementary decoding and encoding processes of 163 Swedish-German bilingual students, whose length of residence in Sweden varied. It was demonstrated that decoding in two languages, expressed in terms of reaction time, develops faster than encoding. (SW)

Two studies evaluated the Process-Based Reading Enhancement Program (PREP) with 150 grade 4 economically disadvantaged children. Pre- and posttesting with the Word Attack and Word Identification subtests of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised found significant group-by-time interactions. Results support the efficacy of the PREP to improve…

Examines effects of several lexical and sublexical variables (lexical category and frequency, syllabic structure, word length) in reading acquisition in a transparent language--Spanish. Compares effects of variables in 140 normal and poor young readers. Finds that all variables produced a significant effect on the number of errors made by the…

This longitudinal study of children from preschool through fourth grade examined code-related and oral language precursors to reading. Findings indicated that the relationship between code-related precursors and oral language is strong during preschool. During early elementary school, reading ability is predominately determined by kindergarten…

A case study with two Finnish 10-year-old boys evaluated an intervention designed to promote the spelling skills of students with severe writing difficulties. The intervention comprised strategy instruction, procedural facilitation, and computer-assisted tutoring. Participants showed gains in spelling accuracy, spelling revision skills, decoding…

Describes two models of childrens' literacy acquisition developed by research psychologists. Argues that these models make practical sense by embodying within them the notion that children use a combination of top-down and bottom-up processes to solve the problems of how to read. (RS)

This study investigated specific processing strengths and weaknesses among 75 readers, ages 6-10, with no oral language deficits. Unsuccessful readers of different ages showed similar information processing patterns, and differed from successful first-grade readers on short-term auditory/working memory and decoding/encoding. Three potential…

Merges the Simple View of reading with rauding theory by advancing a revision, called Simple View II. Presents empirical evidence that, when the Simple View II is merged with rauding theory, the result is a theoretical framework which includes interrelationships among all of the important constructs involved in reading ability, for students in…