Students' literacy development in middle school has important implications for their academic trajectories, both in high school and beyond. In this paper, we present a systematic response analysis of sixth grade students' attempts to generate the main idea of short sections of text. We describe patterns that emerged from our analysis of main idea…

This paper offers a theoretical approach to vocabulary instruction from the evidence provided by lexical errors as the main sources of difficulty in the EFL acquisition process, it reviews previous research and from it suggests new ways of dealing with lexical errors in the classroom. Some practical implications are concluded which rely on lexical…

Describes a technique for use in detecting and correcting spelling difficulties. (FL)

Concludes that there is no adequate support for recommending that teachers attempt to increase the incidence of a child's self-corrections when reading. (FL)

Repetitions in children's oral reading are typically thought of as disruptive, signalling the kind of careless reading symptomatic of random eye movement or inattention to context. This perspective, however, runs contrary to clinical experiences, which have revealed that many repetitions are deliberate and benefit the reader by serving at least…

Concludes that in the first stage of reading, students appear to make relatively few nonsense errors on familiar words, whether they are taught with a meaning-based or phonics approach. However, if initial instruction emphasizes phonics, real word substitutions tend to be graphically constrained; with initial meaning-emphasis instruction,…

A study examined the relationship between types of miscues made by readers during oral reading and the errors made by the same readers on a cloze task. Subjects were 79 third and 78 fifth grade students in eight intact classrooms. Both the oral reading miscues and the cloze replacements were categorized using a modification of Y. Goodman's miscue…

Results of a microanalysis of 3,003 oral reading errors by 116 second and third graders support the idea that the actions of students and teachers during error episodes are situated in social contexts, emerging in response to a dynamic interplay of factors that converge at particular moments. (SLD)

Early reading should be studied from three perspectives: the function of print, the form of print, and the conventions of print. In so doing, it may be possible to avoid some of the hazards that have plagued the field, such as unsubstantiated assumptions about beginning reading and how it should be taught, erroneous beliefs that maturation plays…