College students can read, but they often lack the prereading and postreading skills needed to help them think about and respond to what they read. A three-step plan can help students read and understand the text more fully. The first step entails using measures of fitness to determine: (1) the grade level of the text being considered and how it…

The information in this guide is arranged to provide Title I reading teachers with (1) a list of materials that are coordinated with the performance objectives forming the core of the educational program for Title I students, and (2) suggested teaching strategies for each performance objective. Content of the guide is divided into the following…

Those to whom teachers are accountable--administrators, parents, and the public--seem to be inclined to ignore the findings of more than 20 years of research into the process of efficient and proficient reading in favor of dehumanized instruction that reduces reading to bits and pieces of skills instruction. They cling to the metaphor of mind as…

Chinese students' reading strategies are shaped by their cultural assumptions and by the background information, or lack of it, that they bring to the material. Most important, their reading strategies are influenced by (1) traditional methods of reading that have led to investigating each word without always understanding the general concepts of…

Recent advances in psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and information processing theory have produced several notions that have revolutionized previous conceptions of reading and what it means to understand. These notions support the idea that more emphasis should be placed on reading comprehension skills in the English as a second language…

To explore ways to improve reading instruction, a study examined the relation of discussions about assigned reading to students' critical reading behavior and investigated the efficacy of coaching teachers on techniques for discussing the readings they assign. Five teachers from a rural Georgia high school, and their classes of 25 students each…

In 1986-87, the Writing to Read (WTR) program was piloted in kindergarten classes of four elementary schools in Tampa, Florida. Under the direction of their teachers and the WTR aide, kindergartners worked in the WTR laboratory for 1 hour per day. Students moved through the five-station laboratory where they learned and practiced phonetic,…

Little coordination exists among the various federal, state, and local initiatives for educational intervention programs for specially targeted populations. This paper discusses issues involved in the development of coordinated educational programs for disadvantaged pupils, with particular reference to Chapter 1 of the Education Consolidation and…

Intended to provide support, encouragement, and ideas for teachers wanting to make the transition from skill-oriented basal texts to literature-based whole language programs, this book describes a successful existing program and offers suggestions on how any elementary classroom can benefit from such a transition. Its 17 chapters are entitled: (1)…

To understand how children in whole language kindergartens develop as writers and readers, seven kindergarten teacher/researchers and a university teacher/researcher studied 183 children in the Manhattan-Ogden, Kansas, school district over one school year. Each quarter, teachers recorded all the writing behaviors they had observed in their…

Reflecting current themes that researchers, by their selective attention, have indicated are important in the field of reading/language processing and instruction, this yearbook presents a collection of 51 selected research articles from the National Reading Conference for 1983. Included are the following articles, listed with their authors: (1)…

To establish a baseline for comparison of the goals of the "Writing to Read" (WTR) program--a computer-based instructional system designed to develop the writing and reading skills of kindergarten and first grade students, a study evaluated WTR in the Kettering City Schools in Ohio. The study examined six areas related to the program:…

Nine of the 15 papers in this collection consider the current uses of technology in education and the implications of this use; the six remaining papers focus on applications of technology in education. The papers are: (1) "A Qualitative Synthesis of Pictorial Complexity on Learner Achievement" (Jay Angert, Jon Denton, and Francis Clark); (2)…

Designed for students in grades 2 through 4, this self-teaching, interdisciplinary reading and activity program comprises a complete supplemental reading, science, and social studies approach to the problems of environmental pollution. Jelly Jam, a caring little animal, helps children understand how air, water, and land pollution affects their own…

Seventy good readers and 70 poor readers who were students at a community college participated in a study that examined the role of adversative connectives in helping students integrate information across sentence boundaries. Three functions of adversative connectives were examined: contrast or conflict, parallel points, and foregrounding…