This tribute to Samuel Kirk, an early leader in the field of learning disabilities, describes his prominent achievements in reading instruction, including research in remedial reading and identification of reading instruction principles such as stages of reading development, importance of prereading abilities, and the need for explicit, systematic…

Recent advances in cross-language psycholinguistics provide reading researchers with both the models and the tools needed to investigate the syntactic processing of second-language (L2) readers. In this study, 48 first-language and 48 highly fluent L2 French readers read sentences containing constructions that do not exist in English, pre-verbal…

Analyzes authentic documents in hypertext in light of reading research and proposes solutions to two potential areas of difficulty. The techniques discussed can help students overcome obstacles to reading comprehension. (Author/VWL)

Discusses how the author, a second-/third-grade bilingual teacher, uses miscue analysis to plan reading strategy instruction that meets each individual child's needs by building on each one's strengths as a reader, in both their first and second languages. Appends a description of buddy reading. (SR)

Examines processes used when high school students were presented with documents about the Tonkin Gulf Incident. Finds that mental models created by students were more internally consistent after reading at least two documents, but did not become more consistent after that. Notes that students tended to ignore information in the texts when giving…

Explored the relationship between language anxiety and reading in Spanish. Issues addressed include the following: the effect of language anxiety on reading comprehension and recall of university-level students and the effect of language anxiety on the reading process itself. Two inventories assessed two different anxiety levels: the Reading…

Interviews 18 eighth-graders about their experiences in rereading a book. Outlines what is distinctive about rereading as practiced by middle school students, and its benefits. Advocates rereading as a useful pedagogical tool in the middle grades. (SR)

Examines the influence of first-language reading-models on second-language reading-theory and research. Recommends a sharing and transfer of knowledge between related disciplines, such as first- and second-language reading, to increase understanding of the reading process, regardless of the target language. (PA)

Describes and discusses six recent books for teachers that illuminate, from different perspectives, aspects of the reading-writing connection for struggling readers, and how to teach reading and writing effectively. (SR)

Presents case study of 40-month-old girl with word reading age of 8.5 years, focusing on her phoneme awareness, productive spelling, and phonological recoding. Concludes that her phonological recoding was an implicit process based on sublexical relations induced from her lexical representations rather than explicitly taught letter-sound…

Administers 23 psychometric measures of reading, writing, and related language processes to 102 elementary students and their parents. Notes results are consistent with claim of functional systems theory that the same language processes are orchestrated flexibly depending on task at hand. Finds number of language deficits uniquely predicted…

Examined phonological processing in a Chinese reading test and on several phonological processing tasks. Found that younger normal and poor readers of Chinese made more semantic and visual errors, whereas older and normally achieving children made more phonologically related errors. Normally achieving readers also performed better than poor…

Are programs that emphasize systematic phonics instruction truly superior to other types of programs for young readers, as the National Reading Panel claims? The authors conducted a study of three different programs to see what kinds of readers are actually emerging from them. Two were commercial programs that used explicit and systematic phonics…

In this investigation, we examine the availability of text elements over the course of reading a text. We describe the Landscape model (van den Broek, Young, Tzeng, & Linderholm, 1999) that captures, in one theoretical framework, multiple cognitive processes during reading and the resulting fluctuating activations of text elements. To demonstrate…

The aim of this study was to elucidate the word decoding strategies of Hebrew readers with pre-lingually-acquired, severe hearing impairments as opposed to regular Hebrew readers, and to determine their efficiency. The research paradigm used to clarify these issues asked participants to perform a sequence of three learning tasks, calling for the…