Reading aloud to children is an important facet of the literate home environment and the best preparation for the establishment of preschool literacy skills. David was read to at every opportunity, and a diary was kept to observe, record, and study his emergent literacy events in the home. Since David often asked to have the same books read to…

A pilot study examined the effect of a read-aloud literature program on the attitudes of middle school students toward reading. A randomly selected group of 70 teachers and 1,673 sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students from four regions of the United States and one region in Europe participated. Testing the hypothesis that student attitudes…

Discusses ways to use mythic literature to teach children about themselves and to help them write their own stories and legends. (SRT)

This book is written for teachers, caregivers, and family child care providers who are working with children from birth to five. It presents research on child development and on effective teaching practices to foster very young children's ability to become literate. The book also provides practical suggestions for implementing research-informed…

A longitudinal study of student reading attitudes was conducted in 30 schools (20 elementary, 10 middle) using the Elementary Reading Attitude Survey instrument (ERAS). The instrument tested attitudes toward both recreational reading and academic/school reading as part of the Reading Excitement and Paperbacks Project (REAP). REAP participant…

Analyzes data collected from 121 primary education teachers concerning methods of teaching reading. Discovers that the majority of teachers employ a wide range of reading and writing activities. While most schools maintain a devoted commitment to reading instruction, a lack of consistency suggests a more comprehensive policy. (MJP)

Describes reading aloud as an interaction between child, caregiver, and book. Asserts that the caregiver's role is to provide a framework for children to converse about books--characters, events, and themes. Describes the PeRCS (Purpose explore Read Connect Summarize) idea, which provides steps for language exploration and idea experimentation.…

Compared caregiver-child discourse surrounding information and narrative picture books with twelve 4-year-olds. Found that discourse surrounding the informational book was greater in quantity than for the picture book, and contained more cognitively demanding questions, more conditional clauses, and more interactions involving reasoning and…

This ERIC/RCS Special Collection contains 10 or more Digests (brief syntheses of the research on a specific topic in contemporary education) and FAST Bibs (Focused Access to Selected Topics--annotated bibliographies with selected entries from the ERIC database), providing up-to-date information in an accessible format. The collection focuses on…

A close relationship exists between children's capacity for learning in school (especially learning to read) and the amount and kind of reading aloud done by parents and teachers to children. Children's literature, especially the illustrations and the language contained in fine picture books, has the potential to provide six benefits that…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The seven titles deal with the following topics: (1) the effects of human teacher intervention on skills and presentation time while using programed learning; (2) the effects of advance organizers of varying length on seventh grade…

A study examined whether reading aloud to kindergarten children on a regular basis would have an effect on their attention span. Subjects, 28 kindergarten students from a New Jersey school, were pretested and then assigned either to an experimental group or to a control group (14 in each group). The experimental sample received the treatment of…

The New Brunswick (Canada) Comprehensive Reading/Language Arts Plan (NBCRP) is an integrative framework of goals not only for a developmental reading/language arts program but also for the special students regardless of classification. The NBCRP proposes three major categories of action: (1) the institution and improvement of a reading/language…

This book presents 25 essays and studies that explore the interplay of a variety of factors that provide the fuel for individual and collaborative explorations into the nature of literacy. Essays and studies in the book are "Patterns of Response: Struggling Readers Respond to a Real Book during Transactional Literature Discussion" (JoAnn Rubino…

Reports on an experimental investigation of the effects of a systematic, story-reading-aloud program on some language variables in preschool and first-grade children. Results indicate that both age groups significantly increased their language comprehension and expressions when listening to stories read aloud, either at home or at school. (25…