This monograph discusses research, theory, and practice relevant to how children learn to read English. After an initial overview of writing systems, the discussion summarizes research from developmental psychology on children's language competency when they enter school and on the nature of early reading development. Subsequent sections review theories of learning to read, the characteristics of children who do not learn to read (i.e., who have developmental dyslexia), research from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience on skilled reading, and connectionist models of learning to read. The implications of the research findings for learning to read and teaching reading are discussed. Next, the primary methods used to teach reading (phonics and whole language) are summarized. The final section reviews laboratory and classroom studies on teaching reading. From these different sources of evidence, two inescapable conclusions emerge: (a) Mastering the alphabetic principle (that written symbols are associated with phonemes) is essential to becoming proficient in the skill of reading, and (b) methods that teach this principle directly are more effective than those that do not (especially for children who are at risk in some way for having difficulty learning to read). Using whole-language activities to supplement phonics instruction does help make reading fun and meaningful for children, but ultimately, phonics instruction is critically important because it helps beginning readers understand the alphabetic principle and learn new words. Thus, elementary -school teachers who make the alphabetic principle explicit are most effective in helping their students become skilled, independent readers.

Help children learn vocabulary by reading Vocabulary is fundamental to reading. As elementary students cross over from learning to read into reading to learn, vocabulary knowledge becomes increasingly important. The massive amount of vocabulary a student must learn precludes large amounts of time spent on any single word (Carver 1994, Schwanenflugel et al. 1997), except perhaps for some words that the student will read and write many times over the course of a lifetime. Therefore students must learn vocabulary from text. 1 Help children learn vocabulary during computer assisted oral reading Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor listens to children read aloud, and helps them learn to read (Mostow & Aist CALICO 1999). The Reading Tutor shows the child a story

This chapter describes the Foundations to Literacy component of the Colorado Literacy Tutor, a comprehensive literacy program that uses computer-based learning tools incorporating human language technologies to teach students to read and comprehend text. The Colorado Literacy Tutor project, or COLit (COLit, 2004), is headed by Professor Walter Kintsch at the

A number of software programs on the market claim to foster literacy development. However, we know little about the pedagogical underpinnings of such products, particularly the extent to which they are aligned with current research for both L1 and L2 learners. This study "lifts the lid off " 16 wellreviewed software products designed for elementary grade students-- those products that make explicit claims about developing students ' lexical knowledge and those that do not. The study also examines the potential of technology (e.g., hypertext, animations) to enhance vocabulary learning. The following guidelines, derived from research, were used to examine each product. Does instruction relate the new to the known? Does it promote active indepth processing? Does it provide multiple exposures of new words? Does it teach students to be strategic readers? And does it promote additional reading? Findings indicated that many products that made no explicit claims about fostering vocabulary learning, in fact, incorporated more guidelines than many that made explicit claims. Those in the latter group often merely varied a drill and practice routine rather than helping students really know a word. Findings also indicated that the potential of technology to help students understand word meanings has yet to be fully exploited. … anybody who writes down to children is simply wasting... time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding … Children love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.--E. B. White (1969)

This study investigated young children's ability to use narrative contexts to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary items. Two groups of 15 seven- to eight-year olds participated : children with normally developing reading comprehension skill and children with weak reading comprehension skill. The children read short stories containing a novel word and were required to produce a meaning for the novel word, both before and after its useful defining context. The proximity of the novel word to this context was manipulated. The results supported the hypothesis that children with weak reading comprehension skills are impaired in their ability to integrate information within a text, particularly when that information is non-adjacent and the processing demands are, therefore, high. Analysis of the error data revealed a similar pattern of types of errors for both groups : children with poor reading comprehension were not more likely to produce a thematically inappropriate response than their skilled peers.

this paper, we discuss the relative contribution of several theoretically relevant skills and abilities in accounting for variance in both word reading and text comprehension. We present data from the first and second waves of a longitudinal study, when the children were 7 to 8 years, and 8 to 9 years old

This paper first considers some of the practical and theoretical issues involved when teaching or learning vocabulary items in an ESP course, and discusses (briefly) the notion of what it means to know a word. Following that, it reports on the results of an experiment designed to test the usefulness of a slightly modified version of the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale developed by Paribakht and Wesche and how this has given us insights into our students' knowledge of certain vocabulary items and their learning processes. Finally, it suggests a number of factors to bear in mind when teaching vocabulary. Although the L1 of the subjects involved in this research was Spanish and the target language English, we believe the general findings reported in this paper are applicable to speakers of other L1s learning other languages.

Computer-assisted oral reading helps third graders learn vocabulary better than a classroom control – about as well as one-on-one human-assisted oral reading

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT

Roelien vroeg of er nou nog wat geregeld werd voor je afscheid. We hadden zoiets van misschien een leerzame bundel, maar het is sowieso überhaupt altijd moeilijk om op tijd bijdragen te krijgen. In september was het voor ons zelfs nog niet helemaal duidelijk of je nu wel of niet wegging, want je kamer was nog lang niet leeg. In december trouwens ook nog niet. Gelukkig zou Frans het afscheid regelen, dus we hadden nog wel even. Nadat we de titel van de bundel, ‘Rejected Papers’, rondbazuinden, liep het ineens storm. Wat heb jij veel vrienden, zeg. We hebben zelfs bijdragen moeten weigeren. We kregen enthousiaste aanmoedigingen van het CLCG. ‘Maak er een serie van ’ en zo. Helaas zul je ook wel wat namen missen, maar ja duhuh, die mensen zijn zo knap, moet je maar denken, die hebben geeneens geen rejected papers. Wij daarentegen konden juist kiezen. De meeste hier verzamelde papers zijn ooit afgewezen voor een tijdschrift, sommige zijn gewoon ‘to be rejected ’ of al jaren ergens ‘in press’, maar ze hebben uiteraard allemaal gemeen dat ze het daglicht meer dan waard zijn. We denken dan ook dat het niveau van deze bundel niet erg verschilt van dat van andere feestbundels, want zoals je weet zitten veel reviewers er vaak gewoon helemaal naast. Neem nou de eerste bijdrage in deze