A SURVEY OF 34 KEY PUBLICATIONS ON THE INITIAL TEACHING ALPHABET WHICH HAVE APPEARED SINCE JANUARY 1967 IS PRESENTED. THE PUBLICATIONS ARE CONSIDERED UNDER THE HEADINGS RESEARCH CONCLUSIONS, THE SECOND BRITISH I.T.A. EXPERIMENT, COMPOSITION IN I.T.A., FUTURE RESEARCH REPORTS, AND THE APPLICATION OF I.T.A. COMPLETE BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA ARE PROVIDED.…

Raises a number of questions about current descriptive definitions of reading. (FL)

Praises the writing persona of syndicated columnist Mike Royko and speculates on how he might comment on the research related to reading. (HTH)

Emphasizes the importance of carefully planned research design and cites possible applications for independent groups and repeated-measures designs. Bibliography. (MD)

Timothy Shanahan was surprised to learn that Elaine Garan and Steven Krashen had written yet two more critiques of the National Reading Panel (NRP) report. Each already has more NRP-related publications than any member of the panel, and both have been issuing their complaints over a longer period than the panel worked on the eight studies that…

One of the most frequently cited papers from the twenty-five years of the Journal of Research in Reading is "Object-naming Deficits in Developmental Dyslexia" by Maggie Snowling, Bente van Wagtendonk and Carolyn Stafford, published in 1988. Looking back at the paper some sixteen years after its publication, it is striking to note how topical some…

This book brings together some of the world's foremost literacy scholars to discuss how research influences what teachers actually do in the classroom. Chapters describe the current state of knowledge about such key topics as decoding, vocabulary, comprehension, digital literacies, reading disabilities, and reading reform. At the same time, the…

This paper begins with the assumption that the interpretive practices people acquire in social worlds often transfer to their stances toward and interpretations of worlds encountered in literature (Beach, Thein, & Parks, 2007). The goal of this paper is to identify the history and logic behind one student's negative, ambivalent, and positive…

Introducing new digital literacies into classroom settings is an important and challenging task, and one that is encouraged by both policy-makers and educators. This paper draws on a case study of a 3D virtual world which aimed to engage and motivate primary school children in an immersive and literacy-rich on-line experience. Planning decisions,…

At least 3 different types of computational model have been shown to account for various facets of both normal and impaired single word reading: (a) the connectionist triangle model, (b) the dual-route cascaded model, and (c) the connectionist dual process model. Major strengths and weaknesses of these models are identified. In the spirit of…

K. Rayner, A. Pollatsek, D. Drieghe, T. J. Slattery, and E. D. Reichle argued that the R. Kliegl, A. Nuthmann, and R. Engbert corpus-analytic evidence for distributed processing during reading should not be accepted because (a) there might be problems of multicollinearity, (b) the distinction between content and function words and the skipping…

Three eye movement experiments were conducted to examine the role of letter identity and letter position during reading. Before fixating on a target word within each sentence, readers were provided with a parafoveal preview that differed in the amount of useful letter identity and letter position information it provided. In Experiments 1 and 2,…

The results of two self-paced reading experiments are reported, which investigated the online processing of subject-object ambiguities in Dutch relative clause constructions like "Dat is de vrouw die de meisjes heeft/hebben gezien" by German advanced second language (L2) learners of Dutch. Native speakers of both Dutch and German have been shown…

Reading depends on the speed of visual recognition and capacity of short-term memory. To understand a sentence, the mind must read it fast enough to capture it within the limits of the short-term memory. This means that children must attain a minimum speed of fairly accurate reading to understand a passage. Learning to read involves "tricking" the…