A study was conducted to determine the effects of class size on the reading achievement of 517 representative Madison (Wisconsin) students in a three year longitudinal sample. Data included reading achievement, IQ, attitudes toward reading, parents' and teachers' ratings of student interest in reading, sex, age, socioeconomic status, and average…

Focusing on reading, this issue of "Insights" contains three sections. The first, by Clara A. Pedersen, lists 20 questions which teachers and administrators should ask themselves before administering reading tests. The second, "What's Wrong with Reading Tests" by Deborah Meier, defines reading, describes learning to read, and analyzes the problems…

This paper discusses the linguistic aspects of reading instruction in the elementary school language arts curriculum. The contents include: "Decoding vs. Comprehension," which discusses what constitutes reading comprehension, transformational theory of language, and grammatical knowledge the speaker of English possesses; "Syntactic Factors in…

A limited analysis of alternative approaches to phonemic-level word attack instruction is provided in this document. The instruction segment begins with training in letter-sound correspondences for which mastery of certain skills is assumed. Instruction ends with the decoding of novel items having a consonant-vowel-consonant construction. Contents…

This document is a bibliography of easy reading materials appropriate for adults who are beginning to read in English. It is divided into seven sections: (I) Leisure Reading; (II) Consumer Information; (III) Current Events, Politics in the U. S.; (IV) Health, Nutrition, and Family; (V) History and Biography; (Va) Contemporary Biographies; and (VI)…

A sixth day program is outlined in this book to enable parents to teach preschoolers to read. It is based on the experiences of the author as he taught his two young daughters to read. Enthusiastic praise and material rewards are suggested to strengthen motivation. Reading games are suggested to generate fun and induce frequent repetition of the…

The purpose of this research was to explore the level of perceptual processing being used by normal and educable mentally retarded beginning readers. The investigation tested the hypothesis that beginning readers show a positive relationship between word length and word recognition latency, implying serial processing. Data on accuracy and latency…

Cognitive confusion is the common state of young persons in regard to concepts of units of writing. In the past 10 years, research has accumulated to show that all children pass through the important stage of initial cognitive confusion in learning to read. Children often confuse "writing" with "drawing,""letter" with "number," and so on.…

The purposes of this study were to determine the effect of word length on the learning difficulty of words found in reading materials for early primary level children, to determine learning difficulty indices of a set of fifty words, to compare the effectiveness of three methods of vocabulary instruction, and to replicate treatments for thirteen…

Three unjustified assumptions are often made about young beginners in reading: they all are acquainted with books and reading, the children and the teacher are thinking in the same terms when each talks about reading, and children understand the technical terms of literacy. Reading authorities refer to this lack of understanding of what the…

There are basically two different models for the word recognition process. One model postulates that a reader primarily uses sound/symbol cues to recognize a word; a second model states that a reader focuses mainly on whole-word characteristics. To determine which model best fits beginning and adult readers, a multiple regression analysis was…

In this paper, Piagetian stages are discussed in relation to the internalization of key vocabulary words by children. Research studies that indicate a parallel development using Sylvia Ashton-Warner's idea of key vocabulary of children are briefly discussed. The author agrees that three studies do not completely prove a hypothesis, however they…

While semantic development has been alleged to proceed slowly, reading instruction begins early in the child's school career. Yet, little research has been addressed toward understanding how beginning readers extract meaning from the printed word. This paper reports two experiments that measured latencies in a picture-word interference task to…

Training tasks that comprise the word attack component of phonics reading programs are discussed. Tasks that reflect phonics subskills are drawn from the literature, and variables that appear crucial in distinguishing these tasks are discussed. The analysis is viewed as necessary to generating research questions in a program attempting to assess…

A replication and extension of Samuels' (1967) original experiment assessing the learning performances of no-picture, simple-picture and complex-picture groups almost exactly duplicated the original findings in acquisition performance. However, the critical test-trials results did not confirm Samuels' original contention that pictures can act as…