During the past 40 years, the definition of literacy and the needs of adult literacy education have changed. Before World War II, adult literacy programs usually focused on teaching totally illiterate adults to read and write at the simplest levels. Later, functional literacy at about the fifth grade level was promoted through the programs. Now,…

A study investigated previous research findings that children demonstrate certain confusions about print conventions, and that above average readers perform better on measures that assess knowledge of print conventions than do poorer readers. In addition, the study measured the contribution of intelligence to both print awareness and reading…

While it is widely recognized that comprehension monitoring is an important reading comprehension ability, effective methods for teaching readers to recognize and overcome various comprehension obstacles have not yet been conclusively identified. To determine if microcomputers could be used to teach students to overcome such obstacles, 41 fourth…

A study investigated whether the incidence of ageism has diminished in recent editions of basal readers. Materials examined in the study were the 1971 and 1980 editions of the American Book Company Reading Series, the 1973 and 1980 editions of the Holt Basic Reading System, the 1971 and 1981 editions of the Houghton Mifflin Reading Series, and the…

A study investigated the ability of fifth grade above and below average readers to use mental imagery in reading familiar and unfamiliar text. The subjects, 80 fifth grade students reading either above or below grade level, were placed into either an experimental or a control group. All subjects individually read one familiar and one unfamiliar…

The 10 major articles in this special journal issue deal with literary works designated by individual educators as "still worth reading." The works discussed are (1) "Madeline" by L. Bemelmans; (2) "The Assistant" by B. Malamud; (3) "The Pitfalls for Readers of Fiction" by H. Sample, the first of the pamphlet publications by the National Council…

Students derive more benefits from attending developmental reading courses that are an integral part of the academic curricula (Maxwell, 1997). Colleges that pair their developmental reading courses with content courses achieve the objective of integrating the developmental courses into the academic curricula. This article describes the model and…

Promoting positive attitudes and then measuring attitude growth will help teachers of reading to know if kids like books and how to improve reading instruction. (JH)

An evaluation of an in-service reading skills and learning to learn program, designed to enable high school and professional personnel to both teach and cope with students who need these skills revealed that there does exist an understanding of the dropout problem, there is a need for the development of fundamental reading skills, and that…

A reading immersion program was conducted for 23 Memphis Defense Logistics Agency employees using the Navy Reading Improvement Program. Participants ranged in age from 30-71 and in schooling from 7 years of formal education to some college. Pretesting with the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests yielded scores ranging from 3.0 to 7.4 with a mean…

A study examined the effects of a year-long inservice program to help experienced teachers in one elementary school appreciate and use recent research in reading comprehension. All teachers at an urban K-6 elementary school in a midwestern city attended the weekly inservice sessions which focused on the importance and role of background knowledge…

Research suggests that preservice teachers who have organized knowledge structures are able to respond to instructional situations more effectively than those who do not. It appears that the way a teacher organizes knowledge influences how easily the information is accessed and applied in instructional situations. This study investigated the…

A listing of 97 items of courseware includes programs in seven categories, pertaining to: (1) vocabulary; (2) grammar; (3) verb conjugation; (4) syntax and/or morphosyntax; (5) reading and/or writing; (6) oral language; and (7) other areas of French second language instruction. Each citation includes the title, program type (e.g. drill, game),…

A study examined whether a group of eighth graders whose teacher read orally to them for 10 minutes daily would develop greater interest in reading for pleasure than similar students who did not experience the teacher reading orally to them. Subjects, 36 urban and suburban youngsters, were divided into an experimental and a control sample.…

Readers need to be encouraged to combine prior knowledge with information gained from the text and then try to predict what will happen later in the text. The overhead projector is a valuable tool for enhancing instruction involving prediction. The process of gradually revealing text to a group of students, eliciting their predictions, evaluating…