A study examined the reading performance of 16 individuals (ages 6-16) with Asperger syndrome. The Classroom Reading Inventory found students exhibited reading levels commensurate with their grade levels on Instructional, Frustration, and Listening Capacity. Silent Reading and Independent Reading levels, however, were below grade level. (Contains…

Ninety-one Finnish preschoolers were assessed prior to receiving formal reading instruction. Verbal and nonverbal measures were used as predictors for the time of instruction required to accurately decode pseudowords. Phonological awareness differentiated precocious decoders from early decoders and ordinary decoders. Late decoders differed from…

This paper presents the case study of a student with deficits in phonemic awareness, rapid naming, and word finding. The student's response to instruction during elementary, middle, and high school is described and implications for the educational and research communities are discussed. The case study demonstrates the importance of early…

This paper is a report of a singe-subject reading intervention that was conducted as part of a larger study. The subject's pre-test scores were too low to meet the criterion for including his results in the larger study (Ashcroft, 2004), but he was allowed to participate in an individualized version of the treatment. Because S's social and reading…

This article presents a model of comprehension to support classroom teachers as they engage their students in making meaning from text. Four areas contribute to the comprehension process: the reader, the context, the text, and the transaction, which is described as the intersection of the reader and text situated within a specific context. This…

A learning situation in which the principal content of what is to be learned is not given but is independently discovered by the learner is often considered "discovery learning." Recently, learning scientists have been able to make explicit some of the conditions under which such independent discovery is likely to occur (Andronis, 1983; Epstein,…

While teaching basic reading to students at a two-year college, the author had the idea to introduce his students to texts as challenging as the traditional material, but less complex. In doing so, he hoped to tap into the students' high competency in "street literacy"--the ability to decode the visual signs that are omnipresent in popular…

This research explores if poor grammaticality judgments of late (age of arrival greater than or equal to 12) second language learners often attributed to being beyond the critical period for language acquisition can be better explained by processing difficulties due to (1) low L2 working memory capacity, (2) poor L2 decoding, and/or (3) inadequate…

The purpose of this program evaluation was to examine the effects of "Phono-Graphix," an intensive tertiary-level reading intervention, on the basic reading skills of 16 students aged 6 to 17 years who received special education services. Instruction was delivered one-on-one or in small groups of two or three students. Instruction lasted 8 weeks.…

Developmental stages in reading English words were examined among 118 Chinese children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 from a working-class elementary school in Tianjin, China. Proficiency in Chinese and English, ability to make orthographic analogies in both languages, and strategies in reading English words were assessed. Results suggest that Chinese…

This review focuses on areas of converging evidence concerning the importance of phonological awareness and the corresponding curricular and instructional implications for diverse learners. Five areas of converging evidence are identified: (1) phonological processing ability explains significant differences between good and poor readers; (2)…

Creating a learning and instructional environment for teaching students in a "humane and efficient" manner, this book is designed to empower teachers by providing them with specific suggestions for problems they will encounter as they provide students with direct, explicit instruction in reading. As in earlier editions, the book devotes…

This paper describes a program for improving reading skills at the beginning of first grade so that a rapid acquisition of skills will enhance students' ability to succeed in their respective basal programs. The targeted population used a first grade in a suburban school (Site A) and a first grade in a mid-sized, Midwestern city school (Site B).…

A study examined the effectiveness of the Preventing Early Reading Failure Project in the Griffin-Spalding County School System (Griffin, Georgia) during the 1994-95 school year. The approach was based on research on phonemic awareness and phonological recoding. The treatment group of 39 first-grade students received classroom reading instruction…

A study investigated the ability of native-Chinese-speaking graduate students (N=18) at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh to infer word meanings from context in two passages written in English. One passage came from the "China Daily" and the other from an editorial in a student newspaper. Glosses were provided…