This report describes a study that examined changes in literacy engagement during one year of Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI), a new approach to teaching reading, writing, and science. Literacy engagement was defined as the integration of intrinsic motivations, cognitive strategies, and conceptual learning from text. To promote…

A study examined the effect of direct instruction on increasing students' reading competency. The study followed several studies done between 1977 and 1995 on the Direct Instruction Model for reading instruction, developed and implemented in the 1960s. The population of the 2-year study included 105 southwest Chicago area third-grade students from…

A study examined the effects of active learning strategies; namely, visualization, questioning, and prediction, upon the reading comprehension performance of learning disabled students. Subjects were 6 12th grade resource room students. Prior to strategy instruction, students read and were tested on 3 reading selections from the literature-based…

A study examined the level of satisfaction experienced by parents whose children participated in the first year of the Reading Recovery program at Hazelwood Elementary School (a large inner-city school in the southeastern United States) during the 1995-96 school year. Interviews were conducted with 19 parents (out of a total of 31 parents) and 11…

A study analyzed ideas expressed by 38 parents of 4- to 5-year-old children about their socialization goals and the best ways of helping their child to attain them, with special attention to the domain of literacy. All the participating families had a child enrolled in kindergarten or first grade, all included an older child, and all were…

This essay explores the concept of reader stance as defined by L. Rosenblatt (1978, 1994) as a useful framework from which to view the relative imbalance between the efferent and aesthetic reading of literature, particularly among schoolage adolescents. It then examines how 4 theoretical models and perspectives offer considerable explanatory…

One of a series of educational packages designed for implementation either in a workshop atmosphere or through individual study, this Hot Topic guide presents a variety of materials to assist educators in designing and implementing classroom projects and activities centering on the topic of research about teaching reading. The Hot Topic guide…

A literature review traced a major theoretical shift in the understanding of how people read--from the passive reader who receives and decodes information to the strategic reader who actively chooses what, when, and how to read, reads interpretively, and interprets a text (such as a newspaper article) as an organized structure. The result is a…

A study investigated the effectiveness of a listening program using the reciprocal teaching procedure and the direct instruction model. Subjects, 95 9- to 11-year-old students from 6 special schools for children with learning disabilities, were chosen based on their very low scores on a decoding test, low scores on a reading comprehension test,…

This book presents eight articles on reading disability and its treatment, dealing with research in the field of dyslexia, reading and writing difficulties, and their handicapping consequences. Phonological awareness intervention approaches, different kinds of dyslexia subtyping, early prevention issues, and longitudinal data are dealt with in the…

A study examined the relation between phonemic awareness and reading across the full range of decoding abilities in adults; determined if phonemic awareness can be taught to low-literate adults in one 45-minute session; and determined the effect of phonemic awareness training on the acquisition of decoding skills by low-literate and illiterate…

A descriptive study examined whether reading aloud to children regularly would have an effect on creating independent readers. Subjects, 269 preschool through third-grade students in Cranford, New Jersey, were given a questionnaire to be completed by the parents. Ninety-one questionnaires representing 200 children (ranging in age from 3 months to…

A survey of the training literature on phoneme awareness suggests that help for slower readers comes in the form of a focus on phonemes through stretched sounding and phoneme isolation in a careful progression that considers the number and choice of phonemes and position in syllables. Stretching and isolating phonemes allows beginners to explore…

A study investigated the effectiveness of the Students Achieving Independent Learning (SAIL) program, an educator-developed approach to transactional strategies instruction (TSI). Five groups of six previously low-achieving second-grade students received a year of transactional strategies instruction and five groups of six students received a year…

A study focused on whether literary character sex role stereotyping in children's literature had a negative or positive effect on reading comprehension. It was hypothesized that no significant differences exist in the comprehension of a mixed gender population when reading about characters in non-traditional sex roles. It was further hypothesized…