Research reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications of research are provided in this status report covering the period of January 1 through March 31, 1983. The 16 reports deal with the following topics: (1) the influence of subcategorical mismatches on lexical access, (2) the Serbo-Croatian…

To provide the most effective instruction, materials, and support for beginning readers, teachers need to know if young children are more likely to process from print to meaning-- bottom-up or text-driven processing--or to interpret print to follow meaning--top-down or concept-driven processing. While some studies reveal a correlation between…

Drawn from an annual symposium held at the University of Guam to recognize and encourage scholarly activities of graduate students in the reading education department and to promote continued interdepartmental dialogue on the teaching of reading, the nine papers in this compilation deal with various approaches to reading instruction. Topics…

The product of a two-year study investigating the literacy behavior of nine kindergarten students and their classmates, this report first explains the impetus and the theoretical foundations for the investigation and describes its subjects and setting. It then presents the methodology and the data collected from several related studies: (1)…

Prepared by members of the Institute for Research on Teaching and the Center for the Study of Reading, the papers in this collection examine reading comprehension as an interactive process and explore how comprehension instruction occurs in the complex workplace of the classroom. Specific topics discussed in 20 papers include the following: (1)…

Intended to discourage classroom reading teachers from relying on "phonics instruction" as a remedy for students' inadequate reading performance, this pamphlet presents reasons why phonics drills should not be taught at all in the classroom and offers a set of practical phonic awareness activities to help poor readers overcome reading…

Kindergarten children in three school districts were observed to measure the variance in their abilities upon entering school as well as the variance in the literacy-related instruction they received. The school districts differed in their early childhood education philosophies, as reflected in their kindergarten programs, their choices of…

Previous studies on emergent literacy have shown that since young children learn a lot about writing and reading before they attend school, teachers can build on this knowledge in an integrated instructional program. But just how reading and writing are intertwined in the learning process has not been clearly defined. This study investigated the…

A second grade teacher in a rural Appalachian school draws heavily on familiar regional literature and the children's own rich mountain heritage and culture to teach reading to her students, covering the required basal readings in only one day per week. Students use the basals on Mondays and retell the texts on paper. They spend the rest of the…

A study examined the practitioner's perspective of literature and how literature is being used in the classroom. Teachers, librarians, and administrators at a suburban school serving over 700 children from kindergarten through fifth grade were interviewed, and professional journals directed toward practitioners, published curriculum guides, and…

The progress, development, and evaluation of the Writing to Read computer program developed by John Henry Martin are detailed in the three sections of this paper. Describing the program as a writing-to-read system that relies initially on children's phonetic spelling--letting the sounds uttered be coded without attention to the inconsistencies of…

Traditionally, studies of beginning reading have focused either on between-subjects' differences or on changes in reading performance characteristics induced by specific training procedures. A third approach to reading is a within-subjects' comparison of individual performance characteristics at varying difficulty levels. The present study…

The literature review reported in this paper was conducted to increase an awareness of the positive effects that parents can have on their children's reading progress. The 36 annotations resulting from the review are organized under the following categories: (1) parental factors influencing reading development in children, including the effects of…

The 12 articles in this publication contain information designed to help parents of preschool and elementary school children understand the complex psychological and sociological process of language development and its relationship to learning to read. The articles also provide specific suggestions for parents who wish to participate in their…

As part of a continuing series, this book contains 21 papers, the titles of which reflect the authors' attention to the theme of the conference (the nature of reading behavior and the central role of meaning in the broad definition of reading). Titles include the following topics: (1) reading as one part of language; (2) how home life affects…