Designed for the grades K-2 literature-based classroom, this reading assessment kit includes 6 books which represent the stages most developing readers pass through as they move from being emergent to fluent readers. The kit also contains reading ladder assessment tools and reproducible charts and checklists. The literature selections in the kit…

Poor readers and reading age level controls performed a primed picture naming task and a lexical decision task. Additionally, vocabulary performance was assessed for both groups. Subjects were 42 Dutch children--mean age for the poor readers was 145 months and for controls was 117 months. In the picture naming task there were three priming…

This monograph offers a progress report on reading in America. The monograph considers the idea that contemporary research indicates that competent readers are constructive and discusses reading habits of adults and children, data on 17-year-olds from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, reading instruction, reader response theory, and…

A study investigated the effects of text processing orientations and reader-generated versus text-based comprehension aids on readers' comprehension of expository text. The processing orientations included memory-oriented processing, organization-oriented processing, understanding-oriented processing, and a read and study control. Subjects, 136…

Picture books enable children to experience "reading" from a very early stage in their lives. Although readers in the early part of this century were trained to read heavy books full of fine print, nowadays readers are being trained to read using intellectually and emotionally challenging picture books. Such books (particularly those by…

Noting that all parents want the best school experience for their children, this booklet, in Spanish, gives parents some ideas about what to expect at different ages and stages of reading development, suggestions for what parents can do at home, and a list of favorite books parents can find in most libraries for parents and children to read.…

In an updated edition, this book is intended to provide a solid, but accessible, introduction to what is known about the psychology of reading. The book is not aimed at cognitive psychologists, but at those who have had an academic background equivalent to the introductory course in psychology. The guiding purpose of the book is to address what…

A naturalistic study of 21 college students (at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania) writing research papers provides detailed analyses of the roles that notetaking, planning, goal-setting, and revising play in students' approaches and examines whether these "high investment" reading and writing processes lead to higher quality…

An exercise in ghostwriting--a process where the reader completes a section of the text in the reader's head based on clues in the text--was used in freshman composition and upper-level composition classes to get students to concentrate on their reading processes. In this assignment, a short story was chosen from which different portions of the…

As material objects, texts are as much the product of visual semiotic codes as of linguistic ones. And throughout history, verbal texts have been combined with nonverbal, visual modes of presenting information, taking a stance toward information and readers, and organizing parts into wholes. The major challenge to creating multimodal texts in the…

Some researchers believe that phonics is the more natural way to teach reading because, instead of requiring the learner to memorize whole words, phonics shows the learner the process by which alphabetic writing is converted into speech. The human baby babbles more than enough phonemes for any language. Before there was an alphabet, humans drew…

A study was conducted to examine the data collected by previous researchers on the degree of helpfulness of natural contexts. In this study two schemes of context cue types were compared on the basis of their contribution to word meaning acquisition, and their relationship to other text and word properties was explored. Subjects were 352 children…

The first purpose of the study reported in this paper was to determine whether subjects trained in phonemic segmentation and spelling would have an advantage in segmenting, which would establish a causal relationship between segmenting and reading. The second purpose was to see whether trained subjects were better blenders than control subjects.…

A pilot case study addressed how a reader engages aesthetically with text. The main thrust theoretically is from the notion that "there are possible worlds other than the one we inhabit." Four subjects were chosen out of a total of 63 subjects in grades four through six in an elementary school in Western Canada. Out of the four subjects,…

The notion of literature's difficulty must have begun with its first interpreter. Biblical readings sometimes allegorized scripture into moral precept, while occult readings (i.e., Gnostic writings) often carried an implication that such texts are either for an elite readership or represent the essence of a tradition of spiritual truth under…