Suggests guidelines for selecting African American children's literature of high literary and artistic qualities for grades K-3. Presents guidelines for all teachers, whether they have African American children in their classrooms or not. Provides a list of 27 selected recent books with an African American context that meet the same criteria for…

Argues that extensive reading is the most profitable way of continuing to acquire a second language (L2) outside and after a language course. Offers a description of the proficient reading process and the typical L2 learner reading process and suggests a reading program that aims to help L2 learners become successful readers. (Author/VWL)

A longitudinal (from kindergarten through grade 2) study with 244 children evaluated 3 hypotheses regarding the causal relationship between phonological processing abilities and reading acquisition. The study found a bidirectional relationship between phonological processing skills and reading skills and stability in individual phonological…

Considers how the development of reading proficiency in children is perhaps the highest-ranking educational objective of legislators, administrators, teachers, parents, and the community. Determines if parental training and involvement in the teaching of selected reading lessons increased their first-grade children's reading levels. Finds that the…

Study uses predictable books to compare three reading treatments reflecting different components of a whole-to-part instructional model. In three first-grade classrooms, beginning readers working with isolated words in a modified word bank activity learned more words than when they worked with sentence strips. Discusses implications for the use of…

Study identifies home literacy and literacy interest as two independent sources of literacy experience among 92 kindergarten prereaders. Together, they accounted for significant variance in oral vocabulary and on a letter-name and letter-sound measure of early written language. Discussion focuses on print exposure versus explicit print-sound…

Examines beginning readers' reported word identification strategies for identifying unfamiliar words in text in relation to reading achievement, reading-related skills, and academic self-perceptions. Indicates that children who reported using word-based strategies showed superior reading and reading-related performance, and reported more positive…

Investigates first graders' use of analogy in word decoding. Finds students read more words correctly after exposure to analogous clue words, and a dictation task accounted for large proportion of variance on decoding of analogous words. Suggests results clarify previous research, specifically, the helpfulness of clue words in decoding by analogy…

Examines beginning readers' performances with great scrutiny to look at both the quantity and quality of words skipped during reading. Finds that students' performances substantiated Paulson's findings that readers did not fixate on every word. Leads to some additional insights concerning readers' eye movements and the implications for reading…

Examines factors accounting for early reading performance in Finnish, a transparent orthography with a clear mapping of phonemes onto graphemes. Notes that measures for grades one and four included reading comprehension, phoneme awareness, and object- and digit naming. Suggests a larger role for phoneme awareness for children learning a…

Describes one teacher's unhappiness with the teaching situation because of the school district's recent adoption of a systematic intense phonics instruction program that every K-3 teacher is required to use with every child via whole group instruction. Argues for the importance of whole language instruction. (SG)

Discusses the label of "whole language teacher" and expresses that the author's concern about being named one is based on his sense that names matter; he worries about who is doing the naming and for what purpose. Concludes that whole language is needed as a way of creating community to support all those language teachers who "teach against the…

Large numbers of students are not benefiting from current reading curricula and practices. However, despite the presence of a scientifically validated basis for teaching reading, the nuances of exactly how to translate beginning reading research into day-to-day classroom practice remain to be validated. In this article, beginning literacy outcomes…

This study investigated the knowledge and strategies that nonliterate adults use to identify print. Participants were 20 low-socioeconomic status Brazilian adults ranging in age from 20 to 74 years. Participants' ability to identify common environmental signs displaying varying degrees of contextual information was investigated along with their…

Reconstructing historical reading practices is always problematic and even more so when we are talking about children, a group of readers whose voices have only recently been considered important enough to take into account in understanding the act of reading. As literary historians, we must recognize that we read texts meant for children from…