Describes the shared book experience, which involves having a teacher enlarge a story book, place it on an easel where everyone can see it, and then read it aloud to students. Discusses the advantages and disadvantages of this technique. (FL)

Provides several types of prereading activities that combine into one strategy stressing vocabulary, oral language development, and prediction. (FL)

Reviews a research project that investigated the roles reading and writing play in children's growing knowledge of social interactions. (FL)

First-graders taught reading by phonics or language experience approach were compared on their ability to orally decode lists of words identified as either real or nonsense words. The two groups did not differ in overall correct responses, nor were their strategies influenced by the "real/nonsense" directions. (SJL)

Examined the hypothesis that good and poor readers would differ in their ability to order stimuli that can be easily recoded as words and stored in phonetic form, but not in their ability to order nonlinguistic stimuli that do not lend themselves to phonetic recoding in short-term memory. (Author/DB)

Argues that English reading should not be introduced to a primary school student with a limited command of English until that child can comprehend the syntactic and semantic structures in the text. Discusses ways of assessing a child's level of English competence and the structural level of the reading material. (FL)

Transcriptions of 156 recordings of teacher/child interactions were analyzed and teacher verbal moves were described as pedagogical, asides, or providing feedback. The pedagogical moves were subdivided into areas concerned with welfare, directions, providing words, word recognition, phonics, and comprehension. (MKM)

Reports that workbooks and worksheets of two first grade basal reader series included more extra words in the written directional statements of their worksheets than in their workbooks. Concludes that this practice may inhibit pupils' achievement of a lesson's objectives when such materials are used for independent work. (FL)

This article investigates the impact of assigning poor-prognosis first-grade students to separate transition rooms, and contrasts it with giving similar children (transition eligible) regular instructional settings and under an individualized program, the New Reading System. (Author/CP)

Describes a pictogram system in which letters are made to look like human and animal characters as a way of teaching phonics to children; tells how teachers have imaginatively implemented the system through activities in such areas as drama, singing, and story telling. (GT)

Reviews the procedures, findings, and implications of Kenneth Goodman's 1965 study of the role of context in the linguistic awareness of beginning readers; concludes that "a substantial number of those who support Goodman's findings and his implications do so for intuitive rather than empirical reasons." (GT)

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if beginning readers with accelerated sight word vocabularies would identify more functional spelling patterns than beginning readers not making the same progress. (HOD)

Argues that when reading is taught as a communication skill and as a further extension of language, the teacher should be concerned with helping the student to link up and become involved with the author's message. A child should be encouraged to search for the meaning of what he reads when he begins to learn to read. (Author/JM)

Argues that the secret behind truly powerful learning lies in developing students' metacognitive abilities. Presents an overview of the role of formative assessment in learning to read and in reading to learn. Discusses some research-based instructional techniques useful in helping students take executive control of the reading act. (SR)