These 14 papers on literacy from International Reading Association conventions provide practical strategies and insights into factors which must be considered in programs for illiterates. Each section begins with focus questions to aid the reader in acquiring the basic intent of the articles. The three papers in section 1 deal with the issues of…

A sample of 24 community-based Right to Read projects, 13 serving in-school youth and 11 serving out-of-school adults, were evaluated in this study. The objectives were to measure improvement in reading achievement and to analyze the relationships between achievement and programs, staff, and student characteristics. Testing and data collection was…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the status of nonfiction in the reading interests of second, third, and fourth graders and to determine the effectiveness of a personal reading record as a measure of reading interests. All students in the second, third, and fourth grades of a middle-class rural area in central New Jersey served as…

The purpose of this study was to determine and to interpret the effect of two differing approaches to reading instruction on the self-social concepts of first grade children. The concepts analyzed were self-esteem; social interest; individuation; complexity; realism; identifications with mother, father, teacher, and friend; and preferences for…

The purpose of this study was to measure the gains that culturally different 4-year-old children made in reading readiness activities and the acquisition of a sight vocabulary when exposed to an extensive prekindergarten reading intervention program. The subjects of the study were selected initially from a group of volunteer families. The subjects…

Vocabulary diversity is a measure either of the language spoken within a fixed time period or of the total utterances, sentences, or words. To measure children's language development as revealed by the diversity of their spoken expression, a comparison was made of the vocabulary of 15 first-grade children of average ability, of first-grade primers…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether an intermodal training technique known as visual-haptic had any effect on the reading achievement of a group of disabled readers. The technique itself did not teach reading. Used in conjunction with a conventional remedial reading program, visual-haptic training was expected to serve as an…

This yearbook is a report of the papers presented at the Fourth Annual Meeting of the North Central Reading Association. The titles and authors of the papers included are: "Recent Research in College and Adult Reading" by Edward G. Summers; "The Definition of Reading" by Earl F. Rankin; "The Effect of Reading Training on College Achievement" by…

The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a statistically significant difference in the reading achievement of students enrolled in the reading laboratory approach to teaching reading when compared to those students enrolled in a regular self-contained classroom situation. The subjects were students enrolled in grades three through…

This study examined the effectiveness of individually planned learning games used by low-income parents to increase the reading achievement of their children. The subjects were 30 second-grade children in Seattle. Some of the findings were: (1) children who had played learning games with their parents achieved scores that were significantly higher…

This study used the Reading Miscue Inventory (RMI) to examine and compare the reading strategies used by a group of proficient (P) readers and a group of retarded (R) readers, both of which were reading at the fourth-grade level. The purpose of the study was to determine whether qualitative differences in the reading strategies of these two groups…

Conformity to Standard English, ethnic background, socioeconomic status (SES), and modes of presentation were investigated to determine the influence of these four factors on reading comprehension among fifth graders. Homogeneous groups within four experimental categories were formulated: middle SES white students, low SES white students, middle…

The purposes of this study were (1) to determine whether the cognitive achievement in the academic disciplines of English, mathematics, and reading by ninth grade Mexican American students enrolled in a bilingual program was significantly different from that of ninth grade Mexican American students enrolled in a regular program; and (2) to…

The five basic objectives of this study were: (1) to review and analyze five reading programs and write the skills and concepts presented in each program; (2) to compile a list of skills and concepts found to be common in the majority of programs; (3) to develop and write assessment tasks with terminal criteria that require student performance of…

This study tested the effect upon comprehension of repatterning passages from a tenth grade social studies text by approximating the syntactic patterns found in a transformational analysis of the writing of the tenth grade subjects expected to read the text. The thirty-four subjects were asked to write 1,000 words of prose dealing with social…