A study examined how a teacher accommodated diversity in a fifth-grade classroom in an inner-city school during a 2-year project involving literature-based reading instruction with small student-led response groups called Book Clubs. The Book Club project operated in the classroom using the four components of literacy instruction--reading,…

A cross-curricular comparison focused on learner interpretations of beginning reading and writing instruction in skills-based and whole language inner-city classrooms across kindergarten and first grade. Subjects, 48 low socioeconomic-status students in four classrooms in two midwestern cities, were observed during literacy instruction twice…

Designed to improve underachieving high school students' reading and communication skills, the Secondary Reading Program, formerly the Secondary Developmental Reading Program; served 597 ninth, tenth, and eleventh graders in 12 Columbus, Ohio, public schools. Funding was made available through the Ohio Disadvantaged Pupil Program Fund (DPPF). For…

The Early Literacy Program in the Columbus, Ohio public schools provided early intervention to underachieving first- and second-grade pupils who appeared unlikely to read and write successfully without additional reading instruction. The program featured small group instruction for 40-45 minutes daily. During 1990-91, 65 teachers served 1477…

Three studies determined if the Summer Step reading program (a residential camping program implemented on the campus of Camp Baskervill Episcopal Outreach of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, using a personalized, contextualized reading approach) was effective, if children's self-esteem was enhanced by participation in the program, and if the…

Concerned with what can be done to help produce more thoughtful, critical readers, this report first presents an historical overview of theories on the origin of language, referring to B. F. Skinner, Noam Chomsky, and Jean Piaget, among others. It then discusses biological reasons for the evolution of language and the impact of verbal language on…

To assess the impact of economic deprivation on students' reading scores in standardized tests, the vocabulary and reading comprehension portions of the California Achievement Test and the Degree of Reading Power test were admininstered to two groups of eighth grade students--60 students participating in the federal free lunch program and 60…

Secondary and postsecondary students who use the read-answer-discuss strategy while studying read ineffectively and do not comprehend or retain main ideas. A study examined the effectiveness of (1) the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity, (2) conceptual mapping, (3) a combination of those strategies, and (4) reading and underlining main ideas as…

Designed to improve underachieving high school students' reading and communication skills, the Secondary Reading Program served 595 ninth, tenth, and eleventh graders in 12 Columbus, Ohio, public schools. Funding was made available through the Ohio Disadvantaged Pupil Program Fund (DPPF). Thirteen teachers participated in the 1987-88 program,…

A practicum was designed to increase the amount of time parents read to their kindergarten children. Fifteen parents in a suburban area participated in a series of teacher-presented workshops to discover the value of reading aloud, learn strategies for presenting literature, and practice reading aloud to their children. All seven of the behavioral…

Based on the hypothesis that teachers' naturally occurring presentations of storyreading have an effect on children's literacy learning, a study examined whether teachers can be trained to provide a structure for listening to stories and whether this type of presentation would result in significant gains in children's story understanding. Five…

The wealth of information gleaned from reading research both past and present needs to be applied to a practical eclectic reading methodology. First, an emergent instruction model needs to be created that takes into account the immediate interests and needs of the learner. This model should recognize that learning is a transaction, with the…

Containing selections of the papers presented at the 1984 and 1985 annual meetings of the North Central Reading Association, this yearbook includes sections on research; reviews of research; professional issues; and program descriptions. Papers include: "Twenty-Five Years of Professional Progress" (James E. Walker); "A Study of Student Alienation…

A study compared the performances of adults who were learning to read with those of two groups of preliterate and second-grade children on selected cognitive tasks and on the display of certain metacognitive understandings. It was hypothesized that if the adults (who could not successfully read a passage from a fourth-grade reader) did as well as…

A study examined low-socioeconomic status (SES) urban children's ways of interpreting traditional skills-based literacy instruction in kindergarten and first grade. Subjects, 35 randomly selected children from three inner-city schools, were tested for entering and end-of-first-grade knowledge of six domains of written language. Subjects' scores on…