Describes reading aloud as an interaction between child, caregiver, and book. Asserts that the caregiver's role is to provide a framework for children to converse about books--characters, events, and themes. Describes the PeRCS (Purpose explore Read Connect Summarize) idea, which provides steps for language exploration and idea experimentation.…

Compared caregiver-child discourse surrounding information and narrative picture books with twelve 4-year-olds. Found that discourse surrounding the informational book was greater in quantity than for the picture book, and contained more cognitively demanding questions, more conditional clauses, and more interactions involving reasoning and…

As a part of the teacher licensure program at the graduate level at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), the M.Ed. Licensure candidate is required to complete an action research project during a 3-semester-hour course that coincides with the 9-semester-hour student teaching experience. This course, Education 590 Culminating…

This ERIC/RCS Special Collection contains 10 or more Digests (brief syntheses of the research on a specific topic in contemporary education) and FAST Bibs (Focused Access to Selected Topics--annotated bibliographies with selected entries from the ERIC database), providing up-to-date information in an accessible format. The collection focuses on…

A close relationship exists between children's capacity for learning in school (especially learning to read) and the amount and kind of reading aloud done by parents and teachers to children. Children's literature, especially the illustrations and the language contained in fine picture books, has the potential to provide six benefits that…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The seven titles deal with the following topics: (1) the effects of human teacher intervention on skills and presentation time while using programed learning; (2) the effects of advance organizers of varying length on seventh grade…

A study examined whether reading aloud to kindergarten children on a regular basis would have an effect on their attention span. Subjects, 28 kindergarten students from a New Jersey school, were pretested and then assigned either to an experimental group or to a control group (14 in each group). The experimental sample received the treatment of…

The New Brunswick (Canada) Comprehensive Reading/Language Arts Plan (NBCRP) is an integrative framework of goals not only for a developmental reading/language arts program but also for the special students regardless of classification. The NBCRP proposes three major categories of action: (1) the institution and improvement of a reading/language…

This book presents 25 essays and studies that explore the interplay of a variety of factors that provide the fuel for individual and collaborative explorations into the nature of literacy. Essays and studies in the book are "Patterns of Response: Struggling Readers Respond to a Real Book during Transactional Literature Discussion" (JoAnn Rubino…

Reports on an experimental investigation of the effects of a systematic, story-reading-aloud program on some language variables in preschool and first-grade children. Results indicate that both age groups significantly increased their language comprehension and expressions when listening to stories read aloud, either at home or at school. (25…

Examines students' initiations during teacher-led read-alouds of information books in an urban first-grade classroom. This process allows students multiple opportunities to share authority and direct the classroom's work and talk, thus allowing teachers to view them as knowledgeable, capable discussants speaking as experts about information books.…

Although many may think that a child learns to read in kindergarten or first grade, research indicates that learning to read and write can start at home, long before children go to school. Children can start down the road to becoming readers from the day they are born. Very early, children begin to learn about spoken language when they hear family…

Papers on linguistics and language teaching in this volume are the following: "Language in Education: Hard Choices for Hong Kong" (Jo Lewkowicz); "EL2--Medium Education in a Largely Monolingual Society: The Case of Hong Kong" (Nigel Bruce); "A Programme for Semantics" (Laurence Goldstein); "Semantics and Its…

A synthesis of current research, theory, and professional opinion on how children learn to write, this report begins with a brief introduction followed by a discussion of writing readiness that suggests children's eagerness to learn to write. The third chapter examines children's use of writing to extend the functions of speech, drawing, and play,…

A study examined the effectiveness of the Chapter 1 Corrective Reading Program, designed to provide supplementary reading and writing instruction to Chapter 1-eligible students from New York City nonpublic schools. During the 1988-89 school year, the program served a total of 7,943 students at 162 instructional sites. The total included 4,656…