This research synthesis identifies areas of convergence in reading research regarding the importance, dimensions, and effects of phonological awareness on the reading acquisition process. It also highlights similarities and differences between normal achievers and diverse learners. The following five areas of research convergence are identified:…

Pointing out that the label of dyslexia carries an acute stigma of mental incompetence (and the researcher/author is herself dyslexic), this booklet intends to provide educators and parents with a frame of reference regarding the topic of dyslexia. Defining dyslexia broadly as "characterized by a consistent difficulty with processing…

A study examined the effects of age upon the amount and kind of explicit information in oral summary tasks of preschool and third-grade children. Findings show an important developmental change in the use and in the type of inferential operations. Preschool children used fewer connectors and were not as able to preserve the original order of…

A study expanded on earlier research into "envisionment," defined as "a personal text-world embodying all the reader understands, assumes, or imagines up to that point in the reading," in learners of English as a second language (ESL). Five Mexican engineering students performed think-aloud protocols while reading a short…

Focusing on better assessing the thinking, or meaning-making, aspects of reading that are emphasized in current views of the reading process, this book presents the Informal Reading-Thinking Inventory (IR-TI) which offers options to enhance assessment beyond assessing students' listening level, oral reading of words, and basic comprehension. The…

This book summarizes approximately 600 reports of reading research identified between July 1, 1991 and June 30, 1992. Research studies in the book are categorized into six major areas: (1) summaries of reading research; (2) teacher preparation and practice; (3) sociology of reading; (4) physiology and psychology of reading; (5) the teaching of…

Although reading has been studied extensively over the past few decades, its measurement and amelioration continues to be problematic. This paper explores the reasons for this within a psycho-educational perspective and offers several new alternative theoretical positions from which to view prose processing and enhancement. Implications for…

Reading and writing have traditionally been treated as separate processes, but some research on the relationship suggests that the two processes should be taught together. It is also proposed that skill in recognizing a text's main idea is a summarizing skill, demanding the cognitive and linguistic prerequisites appropriate to the text type. Good…

Aimed at entering college students whose skills are at a precollege level, this book focuses on reading comprehension and explores reading as a form of the thinking process. The primary focus of the book is on helping students grasp the main ideas and supporting details of material they are assigned to read in their college textbooks. Chapters…

Instructional Feature Analysis allows teachers to explain, articulate, and evaluate the processes by which students learn and the activities that involve students in those processes. To develop an Instructional Feature Analysis, teachers must first ask what processes their students need to engage in if they are to learn from a reading assignment.…

Thirty grade 4 subjects were individually tested on a digit span test of working memory capacity (Case and Kurland) and the Reading Span Test (Daneman and Carpenter). The Reading Span Test was administered using sentences at a grade 2, grade 4, and grade 6 reading level. It was predicted that, as the decoding demands of the stimulus sentences in…

Designed to assess how people read and comprehend information presented in picture-text amalgams in procedural texts, this instrument presents various combinations of text information and illustrative information on slides. Subjects are assigned to one of four conditions and directed to follow the instructions presented on the slides. Videotapes…

Readers as well as writers compose meaning. Using the same characteristics essential to effective writing--planning, drafting, aligning, revising, and monitoring--readers react creatively with the text. In response to the author's intention and their own knowledge base, they decide what they want to get from their reading. Constantly renegotiating…

In teaching Japanese as a second language, structure should be introduced through the spoken language so the forms are already familiar when the reading begins, just as the native Japanese child masters a syllabic writing system first then learns characters so that the graphic representation occurs within familiar grammatical patterns. (SCC)

A study examined the effect of gender, age, and cognitive task on three types of reading recall. Subjects, 40 boys and girls in the second grade and 40 in the fifth grade from a suburban Northeast school system, all reading at or above grade level, performed cued or free recall on four high-interest short stories. Reading recall was assessed via…