A contract deliverable on the NIE Communication Skills Project, this report consists of three separate documents describing the instructional implications of the analytic and empirical work carried out for the "Classroom Instruction in Reading Comprehension" part of the project: (1) Guidelines for Phrasal Segmentation; (2) Parsing Tasks…

Nursery rhymes and written phonics used in a meaningful context are valuable teaching methods which can be applied in a whole language classroom or in conjunction with a basal reading program. Because nursery rhymes are rooted in oral tradition they lend themselves to oral presentation. They provide forms for the oral beginnings of the best of…

A study investigated the degree to which scores on content-based tests were influenced by non-content factors such as difficulty with reading, lack of confidence in responding independently to a test, and inexperience with modes of responding to multiple-choice questions. A test compiled from science, math, and social studies material in a primary…

The document describes the development and use of skill sequences in individualized education programs (IEPs) for mildly handicapped students. Developed to standardize format and terminology among teachers and parents, the sequences promote the continuity of instruction and the maintenance of consistent records. Sequences were developed for use…

Investigating the selective attention strategy, a study examined the type of attention allocated to important information by good and poor readers. Also tested was the methodological validity of using a conceptual (word recognition) perceptual (tachistoscopic word flash) task as a means of investigating the types of information processing that may…

Within the framework of a general model of communication, a model of language communication has been developed and applied to the perception of cohesion. To measure students' perception of textual cohesion, a pilot study in the United Kingdom built "noise" into texts by deleting parts of each texts. Subjects, 59 nonremedial students whose first…

The primary goal of early reading instruction, according to this paper, should be to teach children to comprehend written discourse in a manner similar to that for oral discourse because both types of discourse require decoding ability--graphic or acoustic. The paper asserts that to simply design reading instruction to achieve the subgoal of…

A case study is described in which an application of Goodman's Psycholinguistic Guessing Game model of reading was attempted with an elderly illiterate woman. Instructional materials were devised consistent with the theory of the game, and a tutorial was conducted. Researcher observations were recorded with respect to the subject's…

A model for the measurement of reading skills was used as the basis for the development of the Decoding Skills Test. The model emphasizes that decoding skills are based on one of two processes: word recognition through phonic/linguistic decoding or through basal word recognition. Word lists appropriate for the elementary grades were used to…

A group test and individual interviews were used to investigate quantitative and qualitative aspects of students' vocabularies. Subjects for the group test were 144 high-, middle-, and low-ability fourth and sixth graders. Subjects for the interviews were eight high- and low-ability third and fifth graders. The group test consisted of two forms of…

Hartford, Connecticut's Intensive Reading Instructional Teams (IRIT) were designed to improve achievement levels of elementary pupils deficient in basic language and reading skills. In 1978-1979, 683 students in grades two through six received instruction in reading vocabulary and comprehension and in decoding. This report updates and expands an…

Three studies were conducted as part of a series designed to identify the subskills of word identification that correlate most highly with reading comprehension and to examine various methods of assessing these subskills. In the first study, the prototype of a decoding (word identification) test was administered to 282 first, third, and fifth…

In this study, two hypotheses are examined: (1) There is a positive correlation between the incidence of dialect speech of black second graders and their perception that dialect speech is "bad." (2) Use of dialect speech does not interfere with the speaker's ability to identify words in traditional orthography. The study established language…

The main purpose of this study was to structure and compare two series of grapheme-phoneme correspondence and phonics generalizations. The first series of correspondences and generalizations is designed for seriously disabled readers in grades 3-9 and was derived through a phonemic analysis of the first 1,500 words of the Heritage list ( The…

It was hypothesized that nonverbal auditory-visual processing skills relevant to reading could be investigated through a music program structured to parallel the verbal decoding process. The current investigation consisted of three endeavors: the development of a nonverbal reading prototype (through the application of music); the development of a…