Studies use of a restricted language, Simplified English (SE), to write procedural documents for specific audiences. Examines the effect of type (SE versus non-SE), passage (A versus B), and native language on the comprehensibility, identification of content location, and task completion of procedure documents for airplane maintenance. Suggests…

Finds that some high school students benefited from explicit instruction in summarization skills, including greater strategic knowledge about the structure of summaries and modest achievement gains. (RS)

Finds that: sentence reading times were facilitated during rereading to the extent that the information had been encoded from the initial reading; participants incorporated new information into their text representations; rereading improved the memory for causally important information; and the correlation between recall and importance was greater…

Describes strategies that research indicates caregivers use while reading books with young children: strategies that simplify or extend book language; prosody; and management strategies so the book reading event is meaningful for children. Suggests how teachers can use these same strategies in preschool settings to plan meaningful book sharing.…

Offers a collection of reflective essays written by past presidents of the National Reading Conference, the parent organization of this journal. Considers such issues as the nature and character of the organization during their tenure and the major research topics under investigation. Attempts a synthesis of the reports that focuses on recurrent…

Focuses on the general auditory hypothesis and its special form as proposed by P. Tallal and her colleagues. Reviews evidence for these hypotheses and finds it to be either purely correlational or flawed by misinterpretation of results and/or lack of necessary experimental controls. Concludes deficits in speech perception often observed in…

Highlights key findings of a study of secondary school boys' literate lives in and out of school. Suggests boys valued school in general and reading in particular, and that they pursued literate activities out of school in interesting and complex ways. Notes they often rejected school-based reading because it was not characterized by qualities of…

Investigates young children's developing understanding of three essential features of book language (i.e. autonomy, conventionality, unique grammar) in two curricular genres (i.e. narrative and expository) in a literature-based, multigrade (1st-3rd) classroom. Demonstrates emergent understanding of autonomy, limited familiarity with…

Investigates the prevalence of reading incentive programs as they are implemented in elementary schools. Reviews the conditions that must be present to motivate literacy engagement. Finds that reading incentive programs are widely used and may violate important principles of motivation theory and literacy engagement. (NH)

Investigates the relationship of rapid serial naming (RSN) and other variables thought to contribute to beginning word reading (phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, memory span, processing speed, and articulation). Explores a preliminary/exploratory model of word reading. Indicates that no variable in the model could fully…

Investigates causes of high and low reading achievement among elementary students using a causal model. Finds support for the model. Notes an implication of the model is that teaching and learning relevant to improving listening comprehension and word identification proximally affect verbal knowledge and pronunciation knowledge, and distally…

Investigates differences between two types of reading probe material to monitor students' oral reading fluency over time. Reading sources were the curriculum in which the child was being instructed at school, and a set of generic (curriculum-independent) passages. Results indicated that students read significantly more words correct in the generic…

Investigates the impact of the interspersal procedure on students' reading tasks. Students read out loud two passages, with one containing additional interspersed brief, easy paragraphs. Students selected the passage that would require the least effort and the least time to read. Results suggest that the interspersal procedure may improve…

Investigates the use of literature as a context for teaching unfamiliar vocabulary to high school students. Compares two methods of instruction. Suggests taking a mediational approach to analyzing the vocabulary teaching problems identified. Illustrates how the knowledge gained through this action research study reshaped the teacher's classroom…

Develops structural equation models to examine the connections between reading abilities and phonological skills. Finds that skills related to reading at preschool age are similar and have the same relations in a transparent language such as Finnish as they do in English; however, differences exist, especially in the relations between phonemic…