The role of reading in educating a future writer is discussed through the study of memoirs by writers including Janet Frame, James Baldwin, and Eudora Welty. The memoirs show reading books to have been a transformative way of melding forms of experience. The following features of childhood reading are examined: (1) the role of the physical book,…

Some aspects of Chinese literacy development do not conform to patterns of literacy development in alphabetic orthographies. Four are highlighted here. First, semantic radicals are one aspect of Chinese characters that have no analogy to alphabetic orthographies. Second, the unreliability of phonological cues in Chinese along with the fact that…

The cumulative body of eye movement research provides significant insight into how readers process text. The heart of this work spans roughly 40 years reflecting the maturity of both the topics under study and experimental approaches used to investigate reading. Recent technological advancements offer increased flexibility to the field, providing…

Natural reading development gradually builds up to the adult vocabulary over a period of years. This has an effect on lexical processing: early-acquired words are processed more quickly and more accurately than later-acquired words. We present a connectionist model of reading, learning to map orthography onto phonology to simulate this natural…

Comprehension strategy instruction has been widely studied in the past 10 years. We now know that students who actively engage and interact with text using particular cognitive strategies are more likely to understand and remember more of what they have read. Students who use these strategies are able to access knowledge that is outside the realm…

Under what conditions can a true "science of mental life" arise from psychological investigations? Can psychology formulate scientific laws of a general nature, comparable in soundness to the laws of physics? I argue that the search for such laws must return to the forefront of psychological and developmental research, an enterprise that requires…

A large body of research (Clay 1991; National Reading Panel 2000; Pressley 2000; Courtney & Abodeeb 2001) on young readers reveals that most children do not know how to check their understanding as they read, nor do educators give them the strategies to do so. Comprehension is the process of constructing meaning while interacting with text.…

Information processing theory suggests that sublexical fluency skills are important to word reading development, but there are few supportive data. This study investigated if sublexical fluency (letter name fluency, letter sound fluency, and phoneme segmentation fluency) contributed to the development of word reading and spelling in 92…

Southwest Educational Research Laboratory's (SEDL's) reading project examines early literacy in Grades K-2 and the prevention of early reading failure. The goals of this effort include the following: developing a framework of the cognitive foundations of learning to read that organizes research information; using that framework to organize…

Recent research suggests that an understanding of a simple children's story can demand sophisticated knowledge of concepts, social life, and literary forms. A well-written story for beginning readers will relate goal-directed event sequences in a coherent and relatively complete form, but understanding the story involves processes extending beyond…

Drawing upon those aspects of "Becoming a Nation of Readers" directly relevant to classroom teachers, this booklet suggests ideas for classroom practices, based on research, that will improve students' reading achievement. The booklet is organized around five instructional themes: defining reading, reading readiness, beginning reading,…