Discourse context may affect comprehension of a word in a text by facilitating lexical access or by facilitating integration of the target concept with the preceding text. In two experiments, we used eye tracking measures to examine contextual influence on the integration of role fillers in scripted narratives. In both experiments, context had an…

In this article, the author, a Oscar Causey award winner, examines the major concepts that have characterized his 40-year career in literacy research. He describes how his understanding of these concepts developed, and particularly who and what influenced his work and how he used these influences. A summary of his current understandings and…

This study explores the ability to access word boundaries of pre-school children, using an on-line methodology (Karmiloff-Smith, Grant, Sims, Jones, & Cockle (1996). "Cognition, 58", 197-219.), which has hardly been used outside English-speaking countries. In a cross-linguistic study in the Netherlands and Norway, four and…

Testing of deaf readers' comprehension of relative clause structures in written English, signed English, and American Sign Language suggests that a specific syntactic disability does not differentiate good from poor deaf readers, but rather a processing deficit may underlie poor readers' comprehension difficulties. (Author/CB)

In her previous books, "Literacy Work Stations and Practice with Purpose," Debbie Diller showed teachers how to productively occupy the "rest of the class" while meeting with small groups. Now Debbie turns her attention to the groups themselves and the teacher's role in small-group instruction. "Making the Most of Small Groups" grapples with…

As reading and writing are both language processes, one can assume relationships between them, but the exact nature of these relationships has not yet been determined. While a large body of research has addressed reading comprehension and written production independently, very little investigation has examined the possible relationships between…

Reflecting important issues in the lives of educators, the contents of the nine essays in this book range from hope for the almost unlimited potential of the human brain for learning and thinking, particularly through language and literacy, to despair at the individual and social damage caused by efforts to systematize teaching and learning in…

This paper explores the concepts of representation and response as illustrated, first, by "seeing-in" (Wollheim, 1980, 1987) or by the "reading" of a painting in which the viewer regards a particular painting from different perspectives and angles. In both instances, the reading involves a dual engagement with the substance and the medium. This…

Suggesting that the common classroom practice of literature instruction is antitheoretical and counterproductive, this paper elaborates theories of reading processes, discusses children's responses to literature, and proposes suggestions for classroom use. The first section of the paper outlines what literature instruction is expected to…

Phonological awareness has little, if anything, to do with reading or the acquisition of literacy. Learned opinion has been divided as to the relationship of phonological awareness and reading. Some scholars hold that the ability to analyze speech into discrete phonic segments is a precursor to, even a cause of, successful reading acquisition,…

Top-down and bottom-up theories have long dominated the field of reading. Recently, interactive models have been proposed by some researchers. One model, the interactive-compensatory model, hypothesizes that a deficiency in one processing area is compensated for by a relative strength in another area. The concept of multiple intelligences is one…

Making the case that the human achievement of reading has few if any equals, this book uses protocol analysis data related to reading to develop a rich description and understanding of cognitive and affective processes during reading. The book concludes that reading is "constructively responsive"--that is, good readers are always…

A study used a clinical interview procedure to investigate second graders' self-knowledge of pronunciation miscues during oral reading and the relationship of this knowledge to oral instructional reading level. Immediately after reading each sentence, subjects, a representative sample of 41 second-grade students from two suburban Louisiana…

"Lennie," labelled early in life with an IQ number below 70, at age 25 and awaiting trial for murder took on the challenge of learning to read a complex, sophisticated language. He joined a class filled with people who were curious about the way words worked and who used the handbook "Crashing the Language Barrier: The English…

The domain of second language reading is a rich source for insights into bilingual cognitive processing. Most cross-language transfer research has been carried out on acquisition and production of second-language (L2) structures. Relatively little work has been done on cross-language transfer in bilingual reading. An overreliance on top-down,…