A study was conducted to identify reading competency standards for students seeking admission to Pennsylvania teacher education programs. The study sought to determine if differences exist in: (1) reading levels, habits, and attitudes of the teacher candidate pool at large public universities, small public universities, and small private…

Six weeks were spent working with a five-year-old kindergarten child who had an excellent understanding of sound/symbol relationships but did not know how to read for meaning. A variety of techniques was used to help the child develop reading strategies and increase confidence: directed reading-thinking activity in week one; student retelling of a…

Information on the Ontario Test of English Achievement is presented. Attention is directed to the background and objectives of the test, test development, subtest characteristics and properties, validity, and recommendations concerning test use. The objective of the test was to determine the language competence of incoming students to assist…

Correct pronunciation is often a later step in the process of teaching English as a second language. However, a focus on the correct articulation of vowels can significantly improve listening and comprehension skills as well as articulatory skills. Vowels and consonants differ in their acoustic properties. Unlike consonants, vowel sounds are…

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…

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…

Designed to add to the existing knowledge base concerning the saliency of features used by children to identify isolated words, a study examined whether the method of instruction influences the extent to which various features are used for word identification and recall. Subjects, 117 kindergarten students from a suburban Buffalo, New York, school…

Noting that conceptions of the cognitive representations and processes involved in discourse comprehension and production recently have undergone an important shift in orientation, this paper points out the importance of the shift to the conception of the nature of texts, of text understanding, and of cognitive processes in knowledge creation and…

Teachers must make sure that the right book gets to the right child at the right time in order to develop positive reading habits. However, once a book is selected, students should be encouraged to think about what they are reading and use the story to evaluate and enrich their personal knowledge. Two classroom programs that use the whole language…

One in a series of reading, writing, and mathematics subject booklets offered to acquaint teachers with the skills tested in each content area on the New Jersey High School Proficiency Test, this booklet on reading presents material that can be used in lesson planning and preparation of materials to ensure coverage of all skills throughout the…

A study was conducted to examine the instructional approaches to decoding and comprehension in the first grade basal reading programs published by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich (1983); Houghton Mifflin (1979); Ginn (1976); and SRA Reading Mastery (1983). In addition, analyses were completed on the comprehensibility of matched stories from each of…

Noting that teachers sometimes fail to draw on students' prior knowledge, this guide focuses on helping teachers both to think about the cognitive processes involved in learning and to design activities that provide students with a solid introduction to various learning tasks. The first section briefly discusses current theory and research in…

The majority of current college freshmen see no place in their lives for reading as an opportunity for intellectual or emotional enjoyment. They read only the most utilitarian texts--appliance instructions or road signs, for example. A teacher cannot "make" students read anything, but he or she can help them find ways to like reading;…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 19 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the relationship between the use of intonation and reading comprehension; (2) developmental and information processing factors in second and third graders'…