When does comprehension begin? This article addresses the question, and will help early childhood and elementary literacy educators understand how young children's comprehension, or meaning making, begins prior to conventional reading and emerges over time. Field note, video, and interview data were compiled during a three-year longitudinal study…

Jedediah Purdy's (2000) "For common things" laments the ironic mode of thought that characterizes our culture's mindset. He calls for a return to devotion, homage, and allegiance rather than what he sees as a jaundiced detachment that has overcome us. Purdy may be on to something, but Alexandra Day (1985) does not seem to adopt his call to a…

Over the past decade in the United States, levelled texts, or "little books" with finely graduated levelling of text difficulty, have regained their status as a literacy staple for beginning readers. Despite their resurgence, questions remain regarding the reliability and quality of these books. In this study, we conducted a detailed…

Argues that children may have difficulty in learning to read because the print in their books is designed to be looked at rather than read, or because theories about a need for uniformity and simplicity result in letter shapes that are hard to distinguish or to remember. (RS)

"The Critical Word Factor," based on word recognition demands of texts, is a measure of text difficulty designed specifically for texts used by beginning readers. The measure is a function of the number of new, unique words per 100 running words of text that fall outside a designated curriculum. The authors investigated the validity of the…

The authors present results of a generalizability study of running record assessment. They conducted 2 decision studies to ascertain the number of raters and passages necessary to obtain a reliable estimate of a student's reading ability on the basis of a running record assessment. Ten teachers completed running record assessments of 10…