The purpose of this paper is to make educators, authors, and publishers aware that they must be concerned with rhetorical form as well as content if they wish to present students with accessible, useful textbooks. Using a case study of textbook perception and use in a school district's sixth grade social studies classrooms, the paper illustrates…

Textbooks currently available for foreign language instruction are generally oriented toward instruction in grammar for its own sake. Until materials are developed that are specifically geared to a systematic development of communicative competence, textbooks must be adapted. This handbook is directed toward that need. It emphasizes the following…

A study was conducted comparing the sex stereotypes present in selected Mexican reading primers published in 1960 with those present in primers published in 1972 to determine whether any significant changes in sex stereotyping were reflected in the 1972 primers. Comparisons were made between four primers published in 1960 for grades one through…

An analysis of the textbooks of five leading Midwest publishers revealed that (1) no safety measures were to be found in the regular basal reading textbooks; (2) safety was always treated as an extra, supplementary issue; (3) the opportunity to easily insert safety messages into regular texts and illustrations was overlooked; (4) the highly…

A study was undertaken to explore how five-year-old children approach becoming literate. Interviews consisting of eight core questions were conducted with each of 20 kindergarten children. The questions dealt with children's concepts about reading and writing, and about the purposes children establish for writing. Accompanying each set of…

Testing the assumption that textbooks were getting harder while students' abilities have been declining over the years, a study was conducted to determine the readability levels of six college reading textbooks across three editions to see if they were equal or the same in readability. The study also sought to determine whether these texts were…

Students are exposed to a curriculum that primes both males and females for a sexist society. Picture books are the first reading materials to which young children are exposed. An analysis of award winning children's books reveals negative associations about being female. Sex role stereotyping is already operative at the prereading and early…

The process of determining textbook content and selecting textbooks for classroom use in public schools throughout America is highly political and raises many fundamental questions about the relationship between education as a social enterprise and other aspects of society--economic, ideological, political, and legal. This study focuses on three…

To determine why some children find textbooks to be much more difficult to understand than teachers' presentations, four reading selections for middle grade readers were analyzed, as were tape recorded lessons prepared by ten teachers on the basis of the same selections. Excerpts from one of the written passages and excerpts and analysis of one…

An examination of eight widely used college English handbooks published since 1974 reveals a range of sexist usage, indicating that authors and editors have not reached a general consensus on which practices they and student writers are to avoid as sexist. Sexism is still manifest in handbooks in such practices as the following: using sexually…

The 66 school censorship cases reported between 1976 and 1978 (it is estimated that only one censorship case in 25 is ever reported) do not really reveal clearcut regional patterns, but they reflect individual and selective group pressures against profanity, blasphemy, un-Christian thoughts, indecency (sexually explicit language and nude…

Seven articles present exercises and techniques to counteract weaknesses and deficiencies in social studies textbooks. Authors of the articles are William E. Patton, Donald O. Schneider, Mary Jo McGee Brown, Thomas N. Turner, Martin W. Sandler, and Jean Dresden Grambs. The authors are involved in various aspects of education, including curriculum…

Seeking to discover how comprehensively and systematically one significant category of semantic elements is taught in current reading instructional material, a study surveyed the teaching and use of prefixes in the teachers' guides, readers, and workbooks (grades two to six) of six major reading series. Findings indicated that many of the most…

A computer-assisted analysis was conducted of the capitalization skills taught in nine series of language arts textbooks. The results indicated that while textbook authors generally agreed on the inclusion of certain basic capitalization skills, significant differences existed with regard to introductory levels, grade-level sequencing, the amount…

This document represents Volume I of a two volume study to determine the extent to which four elementary level social studies programs reflect the multi-racial, multi-cultural nature of American society. The document is presented in three parts. Part I covers the Michigan Social Studies Textbook Act, an historical overview of previous Michigan…