The aim of the study was to examine two types of texts for beginning readers. While leveled readers tend to be widely used by teachers, less well known are Geisel Award books. The Geisel Award is given annually to a high-quality trade book appropriate for beginning readers. This content analysis examined one set of first grade leveled readers and…

Many digital reading applications have built-in features to control the presentation flow of texts by segmenting those texts into smaller linguistic units. Whether and how these segmentation techniques affect the readability of texts is largely unknown. With this background, the current study examined a recent proposal that a sentence-by-sentence…

This discussion focused on navigating the layers of text complexity to determine the embedded text supports provided by authors. Quantitative dimensions of the texts were examined, such as word count, number of sentences, sentence length, unique words, most used words and phrases, sentence variety, Flesch-Kincaid grade levels, and Flesch-Kincaid…

The purpose of this review is to synthesize the existing research on decodability as a text characteristic examining how reading decodable text impacts students' reading performance and growth. The results are organized into two sections based on the research designs of the studies: (1) studies that described student performance when reading texts…

In this study, the student texts and teacher guides of two reading intervention programs for at-risk, first-grade students were analyzed and compared: Fountas and Pinnell's "Leveled Literacy Intervention" (LLI) and Scott Foresman's "My Sidewalks" (MS). The analyses drew on the framework of available theory and…

This study considers the degree to which two quantitative indices--Lexiles and Coh-Metrix--discriminate across levels of difficulty and types of beginning reading texts. The database consisted of 444 texts, representing seven text types that are part of reading/language arts instruction. These text types were distributed across seven levels of…

Describes a study designed to determine the order of introduction of the common phoneme-grapheme correspondences needed for use in decoding written words in the elementary grades. Includes tables showing the order of introduction of vowel and diphthong phonemes and of consonant phonemes, and presents a teaching hierarchy for introduction of…

The purpose of this monograph is to provide a basic discussion of the general nature of syntactic complexity. The monograph describes how the rules of language produce syntax and raises some questions about reading difficulty. The contents include: "Arrangement," which discusses 12 basic sentence types, noun determiners, verb expansions, negative…

Identifies several reasons why children do not enjoy reading, including rote learning, unjustified reduction in number of words contained in primers, patronizing of the reader, unnatural sentence structure, and teacher dominance. Describes a Swiss reading program as an example of a better alternative to American primers. (DC)

Designed to assess the cognitive requirement expected or implied in beginning reading materials and in their instructional suggestions and to determine whether these materials are appropriate to the cognitive development of the children who will use them, this instrument is for use by evaluators with the first reader in a basal series. It directs…

Provides a preliminary look at the syntactic complexity of primary grade reading materials commonly used for initial reading instruction. (RB)

The study found that revising basal reader stories to improve text coherence resulted in improved comprehension for hearing impaired readers. Findings suggest that current efforts to control readability through stringent syntactic guidelines may result in texts that are more difficult, rather than less difficult, for hearing impaired readers to…

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…

Cites studies in which the reading level of workbooks designed to accompany basal readers has been found to be several years higher than the reading level of the basal text. (MKM)

Teaching students how to read is one of the most important tasks in elementary schools. The majority of schools use published basal programs to teach students to read. Several published reviews have indicated that past editions of basal readers did not align with appropriate instruction for beginning level readers. In this study I reviewed five of…