Fifteen regular grade 2 teachers used a set of 150 written lessons that were designed to develop, over the course of a school year, low and normally achieving students' ability to decode by analogy (i.e., to read unknown words using known words). The lessons provided (1) a planned sequence for teaching phonic elements including common spelling…

The primary aim of the current study was to identify the strongest independent predictors of reading comprehension using word reading, language and memory variables in a normal sample of 180 children in grades 3-5, with a range of word reading skills. It was hypothesized that orthographic processing, receptive vocabulary and verbal working memory…

This study focuses on the shared variance between reading comprehension and word-level reading skills in a population of 534 Greek children in Grades 2 through 4. The correlations between measures of word and pseudoword accuracy and fluency, on the one hand, and vocabulary and comprehension skills, on the other, were sizeable and stable or…

"Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition"[R] ("CIRC") is a comprehensive reading and writing program for students in grades 2 through 8. It includes story-related activities, direct instruction in reading comprehension, and integrated reading and language arts activities. Pairs of students (grouped either by or across…

The influence of word recognition and conceptual knowledge on readers' comprehension of narrative text has become a fundamental assumption associated with text processing in the primary grades. Features of conceptual knowledge such as prior knowledge, content knowledge, domain knowledge, and discourse knowledge are believed to be significant…

Thirty grade 4 subjects were individually tested on a digit span test of working memory capacity (Case and Kurland) and the Reading Span Test (Daneman and Carpenter). The Reading Span Test was administered using sentences at a grade 2, grade 4, and grade 6 reading level. It was predicted that, as the decoding demands of the stimulus sentences in…

Intended to (1) provide new data and reconceptualizations relevant to evolving debates, (2) present summaries of current theoretical positions, and (3) in some cases, to juxtapose radically different opinions in a rapidly growing field, this volume offers a number of views on topics concerning visual word recognition. In chapter 1, Thomas H. Carr…

Traditionally, reading instruction has emphasized the visual-sound correspondences in language. The illusion that words can be "sounded-out" letter by letter and word by word to produce meaning needs to be re-evaluated according to the psycholinguistic nature of the reading process. Some nonvisual aspects of reading which are…

This paper reviews recent research to determine why children encounter problems understanding what they read. Four points are discussed as especially relevant to children's problems in reading comprehension: (1) reading differs from early language experiences, and an analysis of these differences can indicate likely sources of reading difficulty;…

Research by developmental psychologists has investigated metaphor comprehension without its surrounding context. This research has the positive feature of being unidirectional, all indicating that the older the child, the greater the possibility that metaphor will be understood. The disadvantages of the studies for educators include the fact that…

The existence of a transfer effect between single-word decoding skill and contextual literal and inferential comprehension performance was investigated using sixth grade students classified as poor and very poor readers. Two training groups and a control group, each composed of 15 poor and 15 very poor readers, were used in the study. One group…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between reading comprehension and the perception of syntactic and semantic errors by fourth graders. Forty-eight students were divided according to reading comprehension tests into high and low performance groups. Each student then read orally twelve sentences, of which four were normal…

This study was concerned with the development of a program for teaching high speed word recognition through training in more sophisticated decoding strategies. The method reported focused on training the student to use minimal visual information while making maximum use of contextual cues in word recognition. The emphasis was on directing…

The primary goal of the conference panel on modeling the reading process was to prepare a programatically related set of suggestions which could lead to a clearer account of reading and to an ability to pose successively better research questions. This panel report contains sections on the development of a model for word recognition during…

Selected by the International Reading Association's Committee on Psycholinguistics and Reading, the papers in this volume were first presented at the 1968 IRA Preconvention Institute: (1) "Reading Is Only Incidentally Visual" (Kolers) suggests that the teaching of reading should move away from the purely visual; (2) "Some Thoughts on Spelling"…