Surveys teachers and librarians. Offers eight tips on the library and media services which help promote exemplary reading programs. (SR)

Explores teacher change within a year's professional development course in Reading Recovery. Finds significant changes in the teachers' orientations to reading, moving from a skills orientation toward a whole-language orientation. Finds that group reflection, learning through teaching, skilled observation, teacher decision making, and coaching had…

Describes a literature-based reading program designed around independent reading and writing periods (IRWP) in which children could choose to participate alone or with others in several different literacy tasks. Finds that the physical design of the literacy centers, the modeled behavior by the teachers, and the time for IRWP resulted in increased…

Determines grade-level reading rates for third- and fifth-grade students as well as reading rates that correspond to independent, instructional, and frustration reading levels as determined through informal reading-inventory procedures. Suggests that availability of reading-level-rate norms can assist reading diagnosticians in evaluating the…

Considers first graders' comprehension-monitoring skills related to their decoding and listening comprehension skills. Concludes that monitoring one's comprehension is already present in beginning reading but that the level of decoding and listening-comprehension skills affects the way and efficacy of monitoring. (SC)

Studies accurate recognition of letters in different types of letter strings when time to inspect the strings is limited in second- or third-grade children. Compares results of children with naming speed deficits and phonological deficits. Provides some support for the hypothesis that failure to automatize letter recognition interferes with letter…

Attempts to better identify the at-risk children with reading disabilities to aid in early intervention before they encounter the years of reading failure usually associated with a formal diagnosis of reading disabilities. Tries to develop a small set of phonological, letter, and memory tasks that would reliably identify children likely to develop…

Examines effectiveness of a reading tutoring program for at-risk first-grade students. Notes that students in the tutoring group met one-on-one with a trained community volunteer who tutored the child three times a week for 45 minutes each session. Finds that students who were tutored performed higher on measures of letter identification and…

Finds that English-speaking students learning Japanese were most likely to obtain correct answers when interpreting novel kanji compounds (words consisting of two or more Chinese characters) when both words in isolation and contextual clues were available. Shows that morphological analysis is an independent strategy from guessing word meanings…

Describes experiences with first-grade children on two "literacy walks" through the streets around their school. Argues that the print that surrounds children in urban communities can provide an excellent source of literacy conversation and learning, and that by taking literacy walks with children in their community, teachers can learn…

Investigates the nature and role of predictable texts for beginning readers and writers in first grade. Examines ways three children used texts to support their early-literacy development. Finds diverse and complex activities, as children made links within a text (textuality), between texts (intertextuality), and between texts and contexts…

Clarifies the concepts of personal and situational interest and their relation to motivation. Presents evidence for substantial relations between interest and text learning. Finds these relations appear to be stronger for deep-level learning than surface-level learning and seem to be largely independent of prior knowledge and cognitive ability.…

Uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to predict how much readers would learn from texts based on the estimated conceptual match between their topic knowledge and the text information. Shows a nonmonotonic relationship in which learning was greatest for texts that were neither too easy nor too difficult. Finds LSA was as effective at predicting…

Notes that memory-based text processing (MBP) is a label that has been used to refer to a theoretical perspective shared by contributors to this special issue. Defines the domain addressed by MBP; identifies the major shared assumptions of researchers representing the MBP perspective; and raises some challenges for MBP researchers. (SR)

Investigates the relationship between phonological awareness, short-term memory, grammatical awareness, and reading accuracy in a follow-up study of 34 nine-year-olds originally studied as preschoolers. Finds the best concurrent predictor set for reading accuracy at age nine was grammatic knowledge, phoneme awareness, and speech rate, which…