Seventy-four students from basic reading courses were surveyed to determine if the courses helped them with the reading and studying they had to do in other areas. In addition, 58 "regular" students were asked to assess their reading abilities and reading and study skills needs. Results indicated that most basic reading students were satisfied…

Research on content area reading in English as a second language (ESL) has focused on the psycholinguistic and educational aspects of reading. Psycholinguistic research has found that reading comprehension is not solely a result of text variables such as sentence complexity and length or vocabulary, but is largely dependent on reader variables,…

The whole language approach to literacy, which has been highly promoted in the Albuquerque (New Mexico) public schools, is based on recent psycholinguistic research on the reading process, and it views learning to read as a developmental process moving from the whole to the parts. It is done in an encouraging, positive environment that is as…

A practicum addressing (1) elementary school students' need to increase their sight vocabulary, (2) their needs for self-esteem, (3) their individual learning differences, and (4) the practical difficulties of providing additional practice time and personnel to teach is described in this guide. The introduction of the guide discusses the community…

Defining reading as a dynamic, interactive process involving the reader in constructing meaning, this guide for the elementary and secondary curriculum was designed to facilitate effective and creative decision making by teachers for (1) integrating reading and writing across the curriculum, (2) developing readers who can independently apply…

Comics are a powerful medium in the way they combine the verbal and the pictorial. Since they are widely used by the school-age audience, and by many adults, better use could be made of them by students if they learned how the comic conveys its message. The similarity in techniques used by creators of movies, television, advertisements, and comics…

As part of the Teacher Explanation Project (TEP), a study examined the relationships among third-grade teachers' concepts of reading, the concepts of reading they communicated during instruction to low-level readers, and the students' concepts of reading. Subjects, 20 third-grade teachers, participated in the yearlong TEP study conducted in an…

An analysis of schema theory at the compositional and sentence levels and its implications for Japanese readers of English prose is presented. The study looks at differences between Japanese and English syntax and concludes with five recommendations for English reading instruction for this group. The recommendations include: (1) pursuing the…

College students' troubles with reading are largely explained by commodity consciousness (materialism or the search for the fast fix) and contextual confusion (approaching a book as though it were television). The challenge for teachers of reading is to make it a human endeavor. For many students reading is an operation done to extract data from…

Sixteen experienced teachers of reading, from a large, northeastern, American university, were asked how, in their elementary classrooms, they would approach the story of Cinderella. This was done in an attempt to find out what conception teachers might have about the way texts could themselves teach children to negotiate meaning, how teachers saw…

To determine whether repeated reading of stories in a developmental reading program would build fluency in slow readers, a study examined five students in the "low" reading group of a self-contained third grade classroom. During a 10-week period, students read a series of 10 stories from the basal reader "Widening Circles."…

Prepared as a guide for teachers, parents, and librarians, this handbook presents guidelines for developing a collection of movable action books (also called pop-ups, movables, surprise books, lift-the-flap books, or novelty books) appropriate for use with children in the home or school setting. Following a brief description of action books, their…

Employing a body of texts for the reading and study of literature in the English classroom leads to much argumentation, with much disagreement about what is fair game for the writing student. To help determine which texts to select it is necessary to define cultural literacy in a different way from that of E. D. Hirsch. Hirsch would prescribe…

Based on an integrated approach to reading instruction, this report of the 1985 Manitoba Reading Assessment includes a reading survey test, with an individual measure of listening-speaking and oral and silent reading performance, a reading interest inventory, and a teacher questionnaire. The 1985 Assessment also re-administered selected items from…

Articles in this eighth yearbook of the American Reading Forum address the dilemmas of teaching reading. Articles, listed with their authors, are as follows: (1) "Deepening a Dilemma: Stylus vs. Computer Writing at an Early Primary Level" (J. Heep); (2) "Concept Maps and Vee Diagrams: Strategies To Deal with the Dilemma of the Restricted…