A study examined the development of reading, written expression and listening comprehension over 3 years. The participants were 77 students in Brisbane, Australia, who were identified by school staff as having a learning difficulty at the end of grade one and who were matched with the same number of normally achieving children attending the same…

A study investigated whether statistically significant differences in reading achievement developed after an exposure to the Writing to Read (WTR) program. Subjects were 15 third-grade students from a 100% minority population elementary school on Chicago's west side who were exposed to the Writing to Read program and 15 students from the same…

Merging the related but typically distant fields of reading education and special education, this book is for teachers, teacher educators, and administrators at all grade levels and in all subject areas who want to know what the fields of reading and special education say about teaching and reaching high-risk learners. Chapters in the book discuss…

Part of a large study in Tanzania, a study provides a broad context of obstacles to literacy, particularly those affecting migratory subpopulation groups. Subjects, 480 adults who participated in national literacy programs and belonged to one of two communities of the Maasai, were interviewed. The first group--the Maasai of Longido--represent a…

A study of two teachers and four secondary level English classes examined how traditional methods of teaching literature were replaced by more interactive and integrated approaches to text, based primarily upon a whole language philosophy. Intervention aspects purposely remained open-ended to accommodate each teacher's understandings and…

A descriptive study used survey methodology to determine first-grade teachers' theoretical orientations toward reading and students' attitudes toward reading, as well as structured classroom observations to describe teachers' reading instructional practices. Subjects, 259 of the 428 first-grade teachers (61%) in 94 elementary schools of a large…

A study investigated the effects of a prior knowledge activation strategy on students' ability to successfully engage in the ongoing comprehension of extended text. Data were elicited from 79 ninth graders who were enrolled in a required social studies class in an urban high school in the Southeast. Equal numbers of high and low readers were…

New views of intelligence and cognitive learning styles highlight ways to increase educational effectiveness by improving instructional methods. Research shows that both hemispheres of the brain play a role in learning, but evidence indicates that one hemisphere may be more aroused than the other in the case of a particular child. Individuals with…

A study examined the effectiveness of the Writing-to-Read Computer Program in elementary school language arts education. The program is designed to teach children to read through interacting with a computer by learning sound/symbol relationships and by composing stories. First through fourth graders from predominantly black, urban schools and from…

A study examined emergent readers' reconstructions of familiar storybook texts for evidence of cohesive harmony. The study focused on: the range of cohesive harmony; whether the level of cohesive harmony would reach linguistic significance; and whether patterns within the original text would emerge. Fourteen inner-city kindergartners were…

A study was conducted to determine the reading habits and attitudes of parents and their children and to determine parents' familiarity with Reading Rainbow (a television program intended to stimulate young children's interest in reading for pleasure) and their attitudes toward the program. A total of 707 questionnaires were completed by parents…

Hypothesizing that severely language delayed children lack sufficient understanding of causal structure to comprehend stories, a reading program concentrated on developing the causal reasoning of 10 children between the ages of 10 and 12 with a verbal intelligence quotient two to three years below average. Instructional activities in the…

A study examined the linguistic strategies of strong and weak readers in grades three and six within the context of D. E. Rumelhart's interactive model of the reading process. A linguistic prediction task was set up to investigate students' use of orthographic constraints, syntactic redundancy, and syntactic and semantic knowledge. A program was…

Reading encompasses a wide range of verbal processes, among them such simple verbal processes as word decoding, letter recognition, name retrieval, and semantic access. The question is whether simple verbal processing differences are adequate to account for general reading ability differences. Across different verbal domains and different ages,…

A study investigated whether reading ability is a significant factor in the level of student writing apprehension and whether writing apprehension is reduced as reading skills improve. Subjects were 49 college freshmen enrolled in a reading improvement course that was directed toward learning in three domains: (1) cognitive--knowledge, synthesis,…