Surveys elementary and secondary teachers' attitudes of the Reading Framework, a document that articulates the rationale for the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress in Reading. Deals with authentic texts, three reading situations, assessment of cognitive aspects of reading, open-ended items, special studies, and state-by-state…

Offers a structural analysis of the children's picture book "Burglar Bill" by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. (SR)

Analyzes 18 articles selected as representative explanations of the whole-language position. Finds three themes that frame the thought and activities of the movement: general definitions, learning and teaching, and reading and reading instruction. Analyzes the articles using deconstruction to find their implicit assumptions, revealing underlying…

Responds to an article in the same journal on the rhetoric of whole language. Challenges issues of representation, motives involved, and the small unrepresentative sample involved. Discusses the rhetoric of camouflage. (SR)

Responds to an article in the same journal on the rhetoric of whole language. Shows how the authors of that article fail to do what they set out to do from their own perspective. Discusses choice of sources, treating the language seriously, and language without substance. Shows how those authors judge whole language not by its own principles but…

Responds to three articles (in the same journal) which responded to an article by these authors on the rhetoric of whole language. Discusses the nature of professional discourse. (SR)

Sums up new integrated approaches to teaching reading that are needed to help troubled college readers cope with advanced academic material. Presents two case studies that show how these approaches can work with very different at-risk students. (RS)

Administers the Preschool Reading Attitudes Scale (categorized into four areas related to children's reading environment) to young children in early childhood programs. Finds significant attitudinal differences between three-year olds as opposed to four- and five-year olds as well as age-dependent differences among the ethnic groups. (MG)

Reviews research in revising instructional text by examining multidisciplinary research in readability, text structure, text interestingness, expert revisers' strategies, and readers' comprehension strategies. Finds that much of this research is limited by a simplistic view of reading, the use of experimentally contrived texts and contexts, and a…

Investigates the degree to which children and adult readers use semantic and syntactic information sources to increase speed of word recognition and to increase speed of determining sentence meaningfulness. Finds three developmental differences in the speed of analyzing these sentences for words/nonwords versus meaningfulness/nonmeaningfulness.…

Examines comprehension of students provided with relevant background knowledge and then tested on two versions of a text. Finds that students who read the revised text recalled significantly more material and answered more questions correctly than students who read the original text. Discusses the importance of the teacher's role in mediating…

Reports on the first New York Literacy Vision Screening, which investigated whether illiterate adults enrolled in illiteracy programs might have undetected visual problems that were interfering with their quest for literacy. Finds a startling 66 percent with vision problems. (SR)

Examines direction, durability, and dynamics of affected shifts in teachers' theoretical orientation to reading after a two-day whole-language workshop. Finds that teachers moved away from initial beliefs as to how reading should be taught and retained this distance but did not move with consistency toward an alternative orientation. (RS)

Extends earlier studies that surveyed educators about their use of and reaction to classroom literacy portfolios. Finds that a growing number of professionals are actually using portfolios. Finds also that educators agree that portfolios should be used for assessment purposes in the language arts and to help place individual students in special…

Describes how computer technology has been integrated into the mission of the National Reading Research Center (NRRC). NRRC's rationale for including computer technology in its research agenda is outlined, current research projects involving computers and literacy are reviewed, and several projects that reflect NRRC's major emphases and goals are…