In this article, the author shares the lessons she learned from the theories and practices of Louise Rosenblatt with respect to teaching reading to young people. According to Rosenblatt, "Every reading act is an event, or a transaction involving a particular reader and a particular pattern of signs, a text, and occurring at a particular time in a…

School officials at a Mount Pleasant High School in Texas, launched an extended-length course venture four years ago in the hope that doubling the amount of class time on core academic subjects would raise student achievement and test scores. Similar strategies are being used in schools across the country, especially in reading and mathematics,…

The National Reading Panel's report on reading instruction placed too much emphasis on systematic phonics. The effectiveness of systematic phonics is presented with a comprehensive framework so that there is a clear implication for institutional practice.

This article provides a case study perspective of one child's literacy learning over the first semester of first grade. This young learner moves from creating stories for picture books to reading, and from stringing letters to using letter names and spelling sight words. Drawing from this data, a cross-analysis of "what was going on at the same…

The authors discuss the nature and domain specificity of reading motivation and present initial results that examined how 2 reading instructional programs, Concept Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) and multiple Strategy Instruction (SI), influenced 3rd-grade children's intrinsic motivation to read and reading self-efficacy. Each reading program…

This study compared the reading and spelling skills of students who were taught to read using uncontracted braille versus those who were taught to read using contracted braille. It found no descriptive differences between initial instruction in the two types of braille.

This article presents well-written and visually exciting informational series books on a range of topics. As children progress through a series, the predictability of the external and the internal characteristics allows them to learn to negotiate various aspects of nonfiction while delighting in the content and deepening conceptual understanding.…

The studies described here are designed to teach reading comprehension to at-risk students in the second and third grades. The focus is on text structure. First, there is an evaluation of a program that teaches students to identify themes of stories and apply those themes to real life; this instruction goes beyond the plot-level focus of typical…

Examined the findings of the "Teaching Children To Read" study of the National Reading Panel and the procedures of the study. Meta-analytic techniques found that the methodology and procedures were not adequate. Findings suggest that phonics, as an aspect of the complex reading process, should not be over-emphasized. (SLD)

We are delighted at the range of issues raised in the commentaries. The breadth and scope of these serve to make obvious the need for an effective evidence base across languages if we are to optimize the teaching of reading. Our psycholinguistic grain size theory clearly did not pay sufficient attention to the role of morphology in decoding, nor…

The purpose of this article is to provide an alternative interpretation of the National Reading Panel's meta-analysis on phonics instruction. The NRP based its conclusion that phonics instruction was superior to other approaches on the interpretation of mean effect d statistics reported in its meta-analysis. In addition to looking at these d's, we…

The theme for the 58th annual conference of the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers (ALER) was Bridging Cultures Through Literacy. In the first section of the Yearbook, Parker Fawson's presidential address captures the unique nature of ALER and its role in his professional development, and then moved beyond to capture the changing…

A daily intensive supplemental reading and writing program was developed to assist students who were: 1. identified with a language disability and 2. identified as at-risk for reading failure in an urban elementary school. The purpose of the program was to help these students understand and develop the connection between oral and written language…

In this article, Ardice Hartry, Robert Fitzgerald, and Kristie Porter present results from their implementation study of a structured reading program for fourth, fifth, and sixth graders in an afterschool setting. As the authors explain, schools and districts often view an extended school day as a promising way to address the literacy needs of…

Self-contained classrooms and resource rooms have been an important component of the continuum of placements available to students who are deaf or hard of hearing. However, these specialized classrooms have been closing in recent years. A variety of factors are contributing to this, most notably the impact of cochlear implants. This article…