Examines the quantity of informational literature found in six basal readers at grades two, four, and six. Identifies each genre in each basal at each grade level. Finds that 16% to 20% of selections and 18% to 22% of pages were devoted to informational literature across grade levels. Demonstrates the need for publishers to devote more attention…

A study examined literature-based stories found in first-grade student anthologies (basals), the adaptations made to those stories, and any award-winning stories found in that literature. Four current reading series were examined: Houghton Mifflin, Scott Foresman, Macmillan/McGraw Hill, and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. The difference in the…

Interweaving sociological/interpretive and cognitive/linguistic perspectives, this book explores the ways in which children first encounter the written word in formal schooling. The book examines the "culture" of literacy as it is introduced and practiced in a corpus of 163 basal and supplementary readers used in a representative…

A study examined the effect of direct instruction on increasing students' reading competency. The study followed several studies done between 1977 and 1995 on the Direct Instruction Model for reading instruction, developed and implemented in the 1960s. The population of the 2-year study included 105 southwest Chicago area third-grade students from…

A study examined six third-grade basal readers (from the years 1969, 1986, and 1993) to determine whether there has been a significant change in the portrayal of women characters throughout the years. Results: (1) showed more female main characters in the 1993 textbook sampled than in the textbooks from earlier periods; (2) found that female…

Noting that teachers have expressed a need for more information on how they can incorporate whole language into their classrooms, this paper describes ways of combining whole language techniques in a program that continues to use the basal reader. The paper first offers a brief view of the basic steps often used to incorporate predictable books…

A study investigated the effects of S2RE, a metacognitive learning strategy, on the reading comprehension of second-, third-, and fourth-grade students, and evaluated its effects on the metacognitive knowledge of third- and fourth-grade students. Pretest and posttest reading comprehension scores for 218 students from a Mississippi delta school…

A study compared the number of word definitions retained by students who looked up words and wrote down definitions to the number of words retained by students who had the stories and definitions read aloud to them. Subjects, 20 boys and 20 girls in a Florida school, reading on the fifth grade level, were randomly divided into control and…

A study examined first- and second-grade readers from the same basal reading series to determine if instructional flow could be identified from one level to another within a series. Three meaning-emphasis series and one word-recognition-emphasis series were selected because of their widespread use in public schools. Results indicated that: (1) two…

The Whole Language Pilot Project in Tennessee was designed to respect teachers' judgments, to assume that their current practices are effective given the circumstances in which they work, and to offer whole language principles and practices as alternatives for teachers' consideration. The major vehicle for helping teachers understand whole…

To provide all children with quality education, teachers must rethink their educational philosophies, according to the president of the American Reading Council. Traditional teaching methods, including phonics, basal readers, tracking, and standardized testing appear to be the cause of school failure. The efficacy of the current models of reform…

The major theory examined in this paper is that the increasing problem of illiteracy in the United States may be due to a faulty method of teaching reading. The causes of the illiteracy problem and possible solutions are explored using evidence from reading research and classroom results. The following topics concerning the teaching of reading are…

This study explored the nature of dictionary instruction in several basal reading series. Three basal reading series from major academic publishers (Scott Foresman, Ginn, and Holt) with 1989 copyrights, were selected for detailed analysis. Results indicated that even where the professed aim of the basal reading series was to incorporate dictionary…

A vast amount of reading comprehension research was reported in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. The study reported in this paper used the basal reading programs considered by California for adoption in 1988 as a vehicle for examining how the comprehension research had affected basal materials. Five series that were completely new and that…

A two-part study investigated the prevalence of unrehearsed oral reading and compared reading fluency for rehearsed and unrehearsed reading passages. In the first part of the study, a total of 21 teachers were interviewed and 24 classrooms were observed. Results indicated that by far the most prevalent practice in basal reading programs is the…