The conclusions and recommendations drawn from a 7-year study of the Initial Teaching Alphabet (i/t/a) made by the Reading Research Unit of London University are reported. The British research showed conclusively that traditional orthography (TO) is a major handicap for teachers and students of reading. Students taught with i/t/a made…

Forty first-grade classes were divided into four treatment groups to determine the effectiveness of three reading methods with low ability students. Treatment A subjects used the regular basal program. Treatment B subjects used the same basal program, with the low subgroup receiving additional instruction from remedial reading teachers. Treatment…

This unit guide, seventh in a series of seven, is designed to provide eighth-grade social studies teachers with materials that develop the facts, attitudes, and concepts of social studies and that also present reading and study skills instruction. Information about the United States as a world leader is presented along with reading exercises in…

A 2-year continuation of one of the 27 U. S. Office of Education First Grade Reading Studies is reported. Students in the linguistics approach were initially taught to read using the experimental edition of "A Basic Reading Series Developed upon Linguistic Principles" by Charles C. Fries and others. Students in the basal reader approach…

This book reports the proceedings of the 1966 convention of the International Reading Association. It presents papers from that part of the convention concerned with the application of research results to classroom procedures and develops the following topics: elementary and secondary education, reading specialists, and the administrator's role in…

A view of skilled reading is suggested that emphasizes an intimate connection between coding and comprehension. It is suggested that skilled comprehension depends on a highly refined facility for generating and manipulating language codes, especially at the phonetic/articulatory level. The argument is developed that decoding expertise should be a…

Skilled reading depends upon a multiplicity of perceptual, linguistic, and cognitive processes; inadequate development of one or more of these processes may in turn lead to reading difficulty. This report considers some of the processes that may be especially problematic for the young reader. After an overview in which skilled reading is described…

This study discusses six specific strategies that teachers can use to improve elementary students' reading comprehension. First, teach the students to use context clues as one vital part of the decoding process, in order to improve comprehension. Second, increase students' depth of comprehension by triggering discussion of materials they have read…

Seventy freshmen in a reading and study skills center participated in a study of the relationship between persistence in participating in a voluntary, noncredit developmental reading program and sex, personality type, entrance reading proficiency, entrance general scholastic ability, type of program selected, and change in grade-point average. The…

A small-group procedure for teaching consonant sounds was tested in two studies with rural kindergarten and first-grade students whose teachers had been trained to use the procedure by means of a videotape model and a live demonstration. In the first study, done at the end of the 1974-1975 school year, the kindergarten and first-grade participants…

The classroom interaction model is a strategy to help both teachers and students with reading comprehension. It focuses on literary or informational work rather than on specific skills abstracted from the work or skills proposed by reading texts or curriculum guides. The interaction model indicates that interpretation, application, and…

There are not nearly enough reading specialists to meet the needs of the large number of students with reading deficiencies. In order to determine the effectiveness of training teachers in content areas to play an active role in helping students improve their reading skills, 15 secondary level teachers representing the fields of mathematics,…

To examine the use of factual and inferential questions as adjunct material in prose learning, a study was undertaken in which undergraduate introductory psychology students used different study strategies on a prose comprehension test consisting of an equal number of factual and inferential multiple-choice items. One-hundred twenty students were…

The commonly-used instructional sequence in which children read material silently and then read it orally is simply not effective. The arguments presented by E.A. Betts in 1957 for silent before oral reading can be countered point by point. Studies that have compared various reading conditions have had serious limitations and have failed to show…

To encourage reluctant readers, teachers can use a technique called "read a book in an hour." Students are assigned individual chapters of a paperback novel to read silently. After they have finished reading, they retell the significant chapter events, state the conflicts, and identify the characters as the teacher records the…