Analysis of third-grade books in the New Macmillan Reading Program reveals that the books exceeded the publisher's designation of readability and did not progress in difficulty from easy to more difficult. Findings suggest the need for more complete and reliable information from publishers concerning textbook readability. (FL)

Reviews research concerned with factors contributing to the reading success and failure of children. (FL)

Reports on a study that reveals that reading may not play as important a role in content area teaching as many believe. (AEA)

Concludes that the dramatic play context requires children to convey meaning through explicit oral language in order to introduce and sustain play episodes. (FL)

Critically reviews an earlier published study that assessed the sensitivity of the cloze procedure to intersentential integration. (AEA)

It was proposed that the young child's awareness of the phonology of language would influence early reading success. Results revealed a strong relationship between the first grader's reading performance and two measures of his/her phonological awareness, invented spelling and phoneme segmentation abilities. (Author/RD)

Two experiments suggest that a sharp increase in reading automaticity occurs during the first grade, but that by the end of the year the development of automaticity begins to level off. (HOD)

Examines differences in the response patterns of primary school children in oral reading and an auditory cloze task. Concludes that the proportions of wrong responses and morphemically acceptable responses were greater for the cloze task, especially for passages on or above an individual's reading level. (FL)

Reports on a study that investigated the position of text line break with respect to the phrase structure of a sentence in order to determine its effect on children's reading fluency. Concludes that line breaks within and between phrases cause less disruption when they occur near the end of a sentence. (FL)

Notes that after 20 years of research on advance organizers there is little unequivocal evidence regarding their efficacy and optimal use. Discusses two aspects of this research that are probably responsible for these findings: lack of scientifically objective advance organizer construction and definition and the lack of objective and valid…

Reveals that the Rauding Scale of Prose Difficulty provides results closer to Spache and Dale-Chall values than does the Singer Eyeball Estimate of Readability (SEER) technique. (FL)

Reveals that portrayals of handicapped individuals occur far less frequently in basal readers than they do in children's literature. (FL)

Previous conclusions regarding the negative effect of illustration on learning to read are challenged. Clarity is also sought on the issue of the effect of illustration on comprehension. (Author/KC)

Reports the findings of a longitudinal study of the impact of literacy on the occupations and schooling of students who were judged to be low reading readiness in first grade. (FL)

Analyzes alternative cloze forms derived from selected deletion strategies, scoring procedures, and blank conditions for respective effects on the cloze test performance of college-level readers. (HOD)