Drawing from the literature on reading research and theories, this paper discusses the problems of community college students with severe reading/writing deficits, reviews the advantages and limitations of various approaches to reading instruction, and suggests a new method of word decoding. First, the paper explores the difficulties facing the…

If a student is to develop reading comprehension, he must possess and activate a number of linguistic and cognitive skills. He comes to the text with certain expectations and uses a cyclical process of sampling, predicting, testing, and confirming to understand it. The overall goal of reading instruction is to produce motivated, independent,…

A study examined how word recognition automaticity develops and its relationship to the acquisition of comprehension skill. Two different methods for teaching reading were used: (1) a global method using the Houghton Mifflin basal reading program, and (2) a code method using the New Reading System, which emphasizes word decoding skills along with…

A creative visualization approach to spelling and word recognition has been tried successfully with both adults and children. Unlike the traditional phonic approach to spelling, which is a left brain, analytical approach, the creative visualization approach uses the right brain. In addition, the approach eliminates the unpleasant associations with…

A study was designed to assess the effect of text format on the decoding and comprehension proficiency of third and fifth grade students. Subjects were 36 students at each grade level who completed a battery of comprehension and decoding measures and then read a set of four stories that had been especially constructed for the study. Each story…

To explore the relationships between teachers' knowledge of basic reading content, beliefs about reading, and decisions about the importance of specified reading learning outcomes, two existing instruments (Knowledge Test of Reading for Elementary Teachers and Propositions About Reading Instruction Inventory) and one researcher-developed…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether good and poor readers of the same age levels differed in their performance on a task which required the integration of semantic-syntactic and grapho-phonic information. Fifteen fourth grade good readers, 15 fourth grade poor readers, and 15 second grade good readers read six sentences that had one…

This study examined the reading progress under different teaching approaches of 89 children with diagnosed learning disabilities. The learning-disabled children were placed either in an experimental group that received reading instruction with materials that sequenced learning in increasingly complex levels (from letter-sound to word to context…

Perceptual units are involved in the reading process in a particular way. Reading starts with patterns of visual perception visual stimuli in combination with either previously learned information or a strategy for selectively attending to part of the stimuli. Whether the visual pattern selected for deeper information processing is a letter, a…

Prereading assessment was first used to predict school readiness and was an assessment of the child's visual and oral vocabulary skills. By the 1970s, readiness assessment had changed from assessment of a child's developmental probability for success or failure in reading to an assessment of the child's skill development in relation to the reading…

Communicative competence in a second language is conditioned by the transfer of linguistic, heuristic and interactive aptitudes. A solution to the problems raised by this threefold transfer might be found in the conjunction of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic insights. A number of pedagogical techniques are suggested in order to show how the…

This study was a follow-up of a three year longitudinal study of factors affecting learning to read. It examined the efficacy of four different approaches to beginning reading instruction on subsequent reading achievement in grade four. Major purposes were to determine what effect maturation and exposure to a non-experimental typical grade four…

Four Intensive Reading Instructional Teams (IRITs) consisting of a reading consultant, two master teachers, and a clerk typist provided intensive compensatory reading instruction for more than 500 Hartford third, fourth, and fifth grade students during the 1971-72 school year. The approach of the IRITs was geared to the concept of individualized…

This report describes the main field test of Minicourse 18: Teaching Reading as Decoding. The purposes of the main field test were: (1) to evaluate the effects of the course on the participating teachers, (2) to evaluate four reteach treatments on teacher skill acquisition, (3) to compare scores for central city and suburban teachers, and (4) to…

Appraises the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement, an individually administered test of reading, spelling, and mathematics for children in grades 1 through 12. Considers the test well-conceived and carefully constructed, though not sufficiently tested for validity in the field. (SRT)