The Sault Ste. Marie (Michigan) Area Public Schools' Compensatory Education Division undertook a 2-year process evaluation of the effectiveness of an early intervention strategy for low reading readiness kindergarten children enrolled in Title I programs. The first year of the evaluation sought to determine whether children exposed to this…

Three studies were conducted to test the effectiveness of reciprocal teaching as a means of instructing seventh grade poor readers about activities they could use to increase comprehension and to ascertain that their comprehension was proceeding smoothly (comprehension monitoring). Reciprocal teaching involves having teacher and students take…

While listening comprehension is perhaps the most ignored area of the language arts, a review of the literature suggests that it is deserving of more classroom instructional time. Involving the simultaneous orchestration of skills in phonology, syntax, semantics, and knowledge of text structure, listening comprehension seems to be controlled by…

To examine the relative effectiveness of the language experience approach (LEA) as a means of motivating and teaching reading to behaviorally disordered students, two children were examined. Subjects were an 11-year-old (Jimmy) and an 8-year-old (Bobby), who were placed in a classroom with nine other children identified as emotionally disturbed.…

The research and practical questions about the internal lexicon, the associated network of internal representation basic to word meaning, boil down to whether in reading English the phonological route is obligatory or optional. Since the English writing system is morphophonemic, not phonetic, access to the internal lexicon cannot and should not…

Working on the assumptions that person, strategy, and task are essential metacognitive variables for explaining effective learning and that a reader's metacognitive knowledge about his or her strengths and limitations necessarily influences the types of strategies applied to different tasks, investigators studied the degree to which seventh and…

A study was conducted to examine learning from textbook sentences that provide examples. It was predicted that an example written succinctly and with a word order that emphasized its parallel semantic relations with the exemplified principle, such as "animals have parasites; dogs have fleas," would have a positive effect on idea comprehension. It…

This paper summarizes research findings on teacher behavior and its relationship to student reading achievement. Research studies included in the review identified actual teaching behaviors, included observations of teacher-learner interactions, were limited to elementary school, and were conducted between 1966 and 1972. Subjects covered in the…

Theorists and researchers have indicated that the Group Oral Review (GOR) provides valuable classroom interaction. Some objectives of the GOR approach to reading (for developmental studies reading students) are as follows: to reinforce the process used in a reading assignment, to aid development of metacognitive awareness, to emphasize the idea…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 9 titles discuss the following topics: (1) a comparison of the effects of three methods of vocabulary instruction on vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension; (2) the use of an elaboration strategy combined with classroom…

Through a review of the literature, this paper describes current practices in compensatory reading programs, (particularly Title I and Chapter 1 programs), offers evidence on how such practices evolved, identifies program features that may be questionable, and suggests ways to redesign such programs to enhance their effectiveness. The first…

Prepared as part of the Turko-Danish Fairytale Project conducted to uncover universal, cross-cultural features in readers' response to literature, this paper reports on a pilot study to determine which three out of nine preselected fairy tales would elicit the most faceted, legitimate response from a population of Danish readers. After explaining…

Prepared as part of the Turko-Danish Fairytale Project conducted to uncover universal, cross-cultural features in readers' response to literature, this paper reports on a pilot study to determine which three out of nine preselected fairy tales would elicit the most faceted response from a population of Turkish readers. After explaining the…

Successive studies conducted in Sweden have shown that linguistic awareness is an important prerequisite of learning to read. In one survey that measured the various aspects of the linguistic awareness of 6-year-old children, a very close connection was found between preschool linguistic awareness and reading proficiency in school. Another study…

A study examined prereaders' story processing strategies by assessing their performance on tasks that tapped their ability to (1) use story grammar and role playing, (2) retell a wordless picture book, (3) read a predictable book, (4) retell an oral story, (5) sequence pictured story events, and (6) fingerpoint-read a nursery rhyme. Parent…