Presents a review of the literature on oral reading fluency. Offers a comprehensive picture of factors associated with fluency development by clarifying and refining the variant ways researchers have interpreted the fluency construct. Recommends research-based instructional principles that foster fluency development; examines approaches used to…

Examines fourth- and sixth-grade children's strategies (using think-aloud protocols or silent reading) for processing informational text. Finds that silent readers engaged in more physical backtracking to previously-read sentences, while think-aloud protocol processing tended to focus on the local, sentence level. Illustrates complex relations…

Follows an ethnically diverse third- and fourth-grade urban classroom of school-labeled remedial readers as they moved from round robin reading to the construction of a classroom theatre in which they interpreted and performed literary text. Finds that children began to see themselves not only as characters and actors but as readers. (RS)

Examines reading-style preferences of 53 Jamaican students with learning disabilities in New York public schools. Indicates that variables most strongly preferred by all students were persistent, kinesthetic, tactual, environmental, motivational, and mobile. Students also preferred reading in the morning. Finds least preferred variables were…

Presents research on reading performance that focused on whole schools. Considers early reading programs in high-poverty, high-performing schools and how these schools allocated resources to develop, implement, and sustain their early reading programs. Identifies practices in specific high-performing, high-poverty schools through case study…

Describes the English-reading development of Latino English learners who were members of the low reading group in a first-grade all-English classroom. Reveals that one boy's development was characterized by two relatively distinct phases, the first marked by plateaus and learning to play it safe and the second marked by cognitive shifts and a…

Revisions a set of data from a longitudinal study of children who were prenatally exposed to crack/cocaine. Shows that the foster mother most often positioned herself as a leader or expert, the child positioned himself as a successful student, and the researcher was positioned by these two as a recipient of information. (RS)

Discusses goals that will best support middle school students' development in reading and learning from text, including actively constructing meaning, learning about themselves and others, reading strategically, and enjoying reading. (SR)

Discusses how writing and reading came together in response journals for first graders, motivating a variety of reactions to literature and showing that even young children have a range of responses to literature that they can express through writing. (SR)

Shows that of the 300 bilingual program evaluations studied only 72 were methodologically acceptable and of that 72 only 22% found traditional bilingual education better than regular classroom instruction when the outcome is reading, 7% when the outcome is language, and 9% when the outcome is math. Suggests that findings do not favor transition…

Challenges the idea that personal experience with issues or events in a community diminishes the use of mass media. Uses the community attachments model to hypothesize that personal experience will increase newspaper reading. Supports the key hypothesis when it comes to reading of the local community weekly and student newspapers, but not for the…

Investigates whether 11-year-old children in Singapore, from English Dominant or English Non-Dominant backgrounds, read better orally when words were presented in list or text. Finds that readers with less exposure to English relied more on contextual information than more experienced readers, and that reading miscues varied according to whether…

Describes a year long literacy improvement project in two third-grade classrooms that focused on struggling readers. Describes small-group reading instruction in the classrooms that focused on 3 components: rereading familiar texts; shared and guided reading, incorporating strategy use in decoding unfamiliar words; and shared and guided writing.…

Finds that preservice teachers have generally favorable attitudes toward teaching reading strategies in their content areas, but that methods courses in content area reading do little to enhance those attitudes. Outlines four activities to increase the desire of students to teach reading in content classrooms. (SR)

Examines the demands made on the beginning reader. Considers implications for classroom practice to promote reading development, and examines the resources used by teachers to introduce children to reading. Argues that the use of Big Books in the teaching of reading is a means to make the reading process visible and accessible to all children.…