Reflecting the work of Yetta Goodman on child language development, this paper examines Goodman's five "roots of literacy" and offers suggestions on classroom techniques for nurturing these roots. The first half of the paper explains how Goodman identified the roots of literacy and describes each of them, including (1) print awareness in…

The literature of reading theory and research suggests a number of key factors involved in the comprehension process. In simplest terms, comprehension is the process by which an individual actively generates meaning from some linguistic input. Five factors of reading comprehension have been identified through research: vocabulary knowledge, the…

Strategies for the development of comprehension during the beginning reading stages are discussed in this paper. Among the topics dealt with are relationships between developmental stages of speech production and reading comprehension; ways of creating a reading climate that promotes experiences with literature; specific techniques for using…

The "back to basics" movement raises questions regarding the nature of reading that is assumed in instruction and testing. Of the three definitions of reading (decoding, meaning-from-page, and intellectual processes) the latter view, which sees reading as a broad range of perceptual, associative, and cognitive elements, is preferred. The…

The oral reading miscue patterns of 26 normal students in grades one, two, and three were compared with those of 26 educable mentally retarded students from primary, intermediate, and junior high school classes. Intelligence quotients ranged from 94 to 137 for the normal students and from 50 to 80 for the retarded students. During the testing…

This study investigates factors which may adversely affect the technical education of Hispanic bilinguals. Hispanic bilingual students (N=36) majoring in science or engineering at the University of Massachusetts were given a variety of exams in both English and Spanish aimed at ascertaining the level of certain mathematically related skills. An…

The approximately 500 entries in this third edition of an annotated bibliography were drawn from the professional literature relating to linguistics, psycholinguistics, and reading. Entries are arranged ln the following categories: (1) beginning reading; (2) comprehension, semantics, and meaning; (3) curriculum; (4) language differences such as…

Past research studies have revealed a direct relationship between reading instruction and the reading behaviors of children. After reviewing several such studies, this paper presents a research paradigm used to explore the relationship between reading instruction and reading behavior during the pretutorial, or planning, phase of reading, and it…

A study was undertaken to investigate the extent to which reading by students with varying skill levels is a text-driven or a concept-driven process; that is, it examined the conditions under which readers used context to identify words. The 72 second and third grade students in the study read target words that varied in decodability, frequency,…

This document reports the findings of a study of children's comprehension of stories containing inconsistent information. The subjects were 84 children in kindergarten and the second, fourth and sixth grades. Twelve subjects from each grade listened to two stories and twelve other subjects from grades 2, 4, and 6 read two stories. Each subject was…

Summarizing the final phase of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, this report presents both general and individual findings derived from the analyses of the children's performance over the course of a year. The first section discusses the following general topics related to the…

The systematic study of reading dates form the beginnings of experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century. Cattell measured reaction times for naming letters and words, investigated parallel processing, and compared legibilities of letters and printing types. From the end of the 1880s to the publication of Huey's 1908 text, reading…

This volume contains a selection of the papers presented at the fifth International Reading Association World Congress on Reading. Part one, "Reading: An Expanding Concept," contains papers that examine such topics as literal comprehension, miscue analysis, and children's literature and reading. Part two, "Some Implications for the…

The purpose of this study was to judge the viability of an operational approach aimed at assessing response styles in reading using the hypothesis of sensory hierarchical organization. A sample of 103 middle-class children from a New York City public school, between the ages of five and seven, took part in a three phase experiment. Phase one…

A theoretical study was designed to validate experimentally the assumption of the necessity to guide a primary student's ability to listen and follow sequences of events as an integral part of early reading instruction. Ninety-six second graders were asked to listen to one of four tape-recorded forms of an eight sentence paragraph in four…