Intended for reading teachers and school administrators, this paper proposes a whole language, comprehension based approach to reading instruction that is rooted in the humanistic acceptance of the learner as problem solver and that builds on strengths and minimizes preoccupation with reading deficiency. Following an introduction and rationale for…

Thirty-three first grade classrooms in Georgia were observed to determine the state of language experience instruction and to examine whether such instruction makes a difference in students' awareness of the reading purpose, their knowledge of instructional terminology, their reading attitudes, and their reading achievement. The Allen Level of…

A study investigated the effects of the prompting procedure and the fading procedure upon the acquisition of word recognition skills in beginning readers. The prompting procedure is designed to overdetermine correct reading responses during word acquisition, while the gradual fading of the prompts results in transfer of control from the prompt to…

This report summarizes research related to the use of a conventional basal reading program with students in the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP). Results of instruction were measured by the number of objectives gained each quarter, the total number of objectives gained, the number of lessons taken for each objective, and scores on the…

The present study is a replication of a Lahey and Drabman study (1974) which investigated the effects of contingent versus noncontingent reinforcement on the learning of sight words. The subjects in this study were 14 Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP) students who composed the lowest reading group in a combined first-second grade…

Reading research is an important aspect of the Kamehameha Early Education Program. This report describes the overall strategy of the reading research program, which is based on a conceptual framework that divides lines of inquiry into motivation, linguistics, instructional procedures, and correlational analysis. Preliminary results for each of…

Suggesting that the ability to identify words depends as much on contextual information available when one is reading for meaning as on decoding skills, this paper challenges traditional, mechanistic skills approaches to reading instruction. In addition, it contends that comprehending (relating written material to what one already knows) is a…

One approach to preparing kindergarten children for beginning reading combines a meaningful print environment with active student involvement in the learning process. The environment of the classroom from the beginning exposes children to meaningful printed words and symbols. Children use name tags not only for identification but also as a way for…

Results of the examination of teacher's manuals, grades one through four, that accompany a number of basal reading series used in schools in Staten Island, New York, indicated that although teacher's manuals included many phonic rules, none of the examined texts gave any utility or frequency data or cited any research studies to support the…

The acquisition of reading fluency crucially involves the beginning reader's tacit recognition that he or she must learn to compensate for the absence of graphic signals corresponding to certain prosodic cues by making better use of the morphological and syntactic cues that are preserved. The success of the method of repeated readings and similar…

Observational data on six first and second grade teachers were analyzed qualitatively to determine whether any of these teachers provided "assisted learning" during reading instruction. Assisted learning was defined as the teacher's intentional efforts to structure the students' learning experiences so that they could learn more easily.…

Children, four, six, eight, and twelve years old, and adults participated in a study of judgments of syllable similarity. Subjects listened to a disyllabic nonsense unit (the standard) followed by two comparison stimuli; they were then asked to choose the comparison stimulus "most like" the standard. Changes between the comparison stimuli and the…

The purpose of this book is to contribute to an understanding of the nature of reading so that teachers can decide how to teach children in a way that will enable children to make sense of what they read. The process of reading, the perceptual and language skills involved in reading, the nature of memory and comprehension, and the way that…

Using Take Home Stories is one method of providing success-oriented independent reading materials to reinforce basic vocabulary from any reading program. Most easy-to-read trade books have too many words that are not in the beginning reader's reading vocabulary. Take Home Stories can be written to be used after completion of an entire basal…

The purpose of this study was to determine if beginning readers read with fewer errors when the reading materials had content directly related to the reader's existing cognitive structure (for example, reading based on recent concrete experiences). Meaningfulness was manipulated by basing the reading materials on an audio-tutorial science program…