The five articles contained in this journal issue deal with basic/survival reading skills. Specific topics covered in the articles are an overview of survival reading, the reading habits of college students, a principal's view of reading instruction, a healthy self-concept as a basic survival skill, and a readability rating list for teacher-made…

To investigate the effects of training children in a specific learning facilitation skill, a study was devised that taught the association of the sounds of letters with their visual symbols. Twenty-six kindergarten children, 75% from low income homes and 75% of part-Hawaiian origin, were paired according to their pretraining scores on a letter…

This paper considers the place of one-to-one teacher/student oral reading interactions in reading instruction. Maintaining that there is an important function for such interactions in learning to read, the paper analyzes one learning process in these interactions--attention to errors--and argues that in oral reading instruction, attention to…

To find an area of weakness in disabled readers that might profitably be strengthened, the level of language development of disabled secondary readers was compared with that of competent secondary readers. The group of disabled readers used in the study consisted of 20 high school students in a corrective reading class; the comparison group…

Parsing sentences into meaningful phrases and clauses is an essential step in language comprehension, and parsing difficulty is a common reading problem. Prosody (intonation, stress, and rhythm) provides information about phrase and clause boundaries in spoken language that is not available in written language. In an experiment to test whether…

Designed to explore new reading readiness predictors that are not found extensively in the more commonly used commercial group tests and to develop new indices to measure the level of reading readiness of beginning first graders, a study was undertaken involving 115 children. The factor of sex in reading readiness was also investigated. An…

This paper discusses an investigation that compared college students' reading gains when using general or specific diagnosis. It reports that significant gains were made on many subskills of the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test by the group that had the prescriptions developed as a result of a differential (specific) diagnosis and that there were…

The relationship between children's language and their knowledge of the various features of their language and their reading is examined from the perspective of several prominent theories about the link between thought and language. The first chapter contrasts features of five significant contemporary theories of language and thought--the Russian,…

Based on the view that text-specific concept and vocabulary knowledge affect the processing and recall of text and that a measure of this knowledge might assist teachers in determining whether a reader possesses adequate background to successfully comprehend and recall a particular text, a study was conducted. Its purpose was to develop a measure…

The "primacy of reading" hypothesis as the explanation for the high correlation between children's competencies in literacy and numeracy is rejected in this paper. Instead, a "primacy of speech perception" hypothesis is examined. It is suggested that analysis-by-synthesis speech recognition procedures are acquired in early childhood and that the…

A study was conducted to measure the effect and compare the results of developmental reading instruction for college students as prescribed from the specific results of a diagnostic reading test and a general, more traditionally used, survey reading test. The sample consisted of 226 students enrolled in different sections of a reading course…

A study was undertaken to document, through data gathered from surveys, interviews, and observations, the approaches fourth grade elementary school teachers were using to teach reading comprehension. The study focused on the actual teacher behaviors, methods, and materials rather than on what reading methods, texts or basal series' manuals said…

A study was conducted to determine the impact on remedial reading instruction of recent Massachusetts legislation aimed at providing diagnostic/prescriptive services to identified special needs children in the public schools. Specifically, the study concerned available programs, certification and deployment of specialized personnel, delivery of…

A REVIEW OF 124 ARTICLES PERTAINING TO COLLEGE AND ADULT READING WHICH APPEARED IN THE PERIODICAL LITERATURE IS PRESENTED. THE ARTICLES ARE TREATED WITHIN THE FOLLOWING AREAS--(1) PROGRAMS, INCLUDING READING AND STUDY HABITS, TRAITS, AND SKILLS, (2) THE INFLUENCE OF READING, STUDY HABITS, AND SKILLS, (3) THE FACTORS INFLUENCING READING AND OTHER…

A CONTINUATION OF A FIRST-GRADE STUDY OF THREE APPROACHES TO BEGINNING READING AND OF THEIR EFFECT ON GROWTH IN COMPREHENSION AND INTERPRETATION SKILL IS REPORTED. THE BASAL, THE MODIFIED LINGUISTIC, AND THE LINGUISTIC APPROACHES WERE STUDIED. TWENTY-ONE SECOND-GRADE CLASSROOMS IN THREE CENTRAL NEW YORK SCHOOL DISTRICTS PARTICIPATED IN THE…