The "shared book experience," a teaching model developed in New Zealand to introduce Pacific Island children to literacy education, is described. The model, based on use of popular children's books, teaches children to master literacy skills the way they master spoken language. Research on early pre-reading behavior is discussed. (PP)

The responses of students, asked to retell stories they had read, were studied through language miscue analysis. The research yielded insights in how readers: (1) predict the author's message; (2) form concepts essential for comprehension; and (3) relate stories to their cultural background. Implications for classroom instruction are discussed.…

Concludes that although sentence-long context did not facilitate the reading accuracy of primary grade children, the children did appear to be exploiting contextual information in their reading of sentences, with a relatively high proportion of reading errors being contextually acceptable. (FL)

Analyzes the roles played by females in Judy Blume's "Are You There God? It's Me Margaret." Concludes that the book offers flat and unflattering portrayals of female characters. (FL)

Concludes that junior high school students encode movies better than prose, but that college students encode both equally well. (FL)

Describes some of the ways early adolescents respond to reading and thinking tasks and details the development of procedures for observing and analyzing children as they complete such tasks. (FL)

Compares the effects of DISTAR, Action Reading, and a cognitive development approach on the reading readiness and mathematical achievement of kindergarten children. Concludes that DISTAR was superior to the other programs on all variables. (FL)

Reports the findings of a study that replicated work done in the early 1970s concerning the media preferences and reading interests of intermediate grade children. Shows that the reading interests of boys remained much the same, with those of girls changing. Both groups continued to prefer television over print media. (FL)

Reports the results of a survey of 82 schools in South Australia and 40 schools in the United States concerning their use of paraprofessionals in their reading/tutoring programs. (FL)

Reports on a longitudinal study of Finnish student development in literacy skills, especially reading skills. Notes that children from the rural northern areas gained most in test-intelligence and literacy skills, catching up with their coevals from the southern and urban areas. (RL)

Reports evidence that some students have reading problems because of instructional emphasis on reading as "exact word reproduction," or of student tendencies to focus too keenly on word-attack skills. (RL)

Describes an experiment which sought to determine what oral reading strategies were operating in the oral reading of primary French immersion children as compared to those in a traditional English language program. (AM)

Problems in mathematics instruction caused by students' poor reading ability are discussed. Teaching strategies based on learning theory are outlined. (MK)

Explains that the core materials used during literature-based instruction are narrative and expository works. Notes that this type of instruction, which has gained increased emphasis in reading research and practice, provides authentic learning experiences and activities by using literature to teach and foster literacy. Reviews pertinent research…

Investigates the usefulness of using grammatical cohesion to evaluate the macro- or discourse-level, and the micro-level reading comprehension of English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students. Finds a relationship between anaphora and coherence that contributes to reading difficulty. (MG)