A Reading Development Course

The effects of speed reading courses have been widely researched (cf. Berger, 1968). Stevens and Orem (1963) have suggested that the superior reader entering such a course with a more rapid reading rate, is an average or above average student, and likes to read. Rauch and Weinstein (1968) and Combs (1966) stress read, read, read as the best method for gaining speed. However, the National Association of Secondary School principals (1965) has warned that speed and comprehension do not necessarily go hand-in-hand, a finding which challenged earlier research by O\u27Brien (1921). A study of Air Force personnel (Brim, 1968) suggests that comprehension remains fairly constant as speed increases. Ray (1962) summarized nineteen representative studies since 1945 and found that most of these reported gains in rate of reading. Fewer than half the studies showed gains in both speed and comprehension

Electronic books: Are they effective educational tools for students who are deaf or hard of hearing?

This literature review will examine the effectiveness of electronic book features on students’ reading development in the general education population and investigate whether or not these digital tools could be a useful tool and/or supplement in literacy for students who are deaf and hard of hearing

Critical reading development

В статье рассматриваются проблемы, связанные с развитием аналитического чтения, предусматривающего максимально полное и точное понимание всей содержащейся в тексте информации, имплицитной и эксплицитной, и ее критическое осмысление. Особое внимание обращается на целенаправленный анализ содержания читаемого с опорой на языковые и логические связи текста, а также на приемы, развивающие аналитическое мышление студентов – задания проблемного характера, требующие мыслительных операций

Reading development at the text level: an investigation of surprisal and embedding-based text similarity effects on eye-movements in Chinese early readers

This paper describes the use of semantic similarity measures based on distributed representations of words, sentences, and paragraphs (so-called“embeddings”) to assess the impact of supra-lexical factors on eye movement data from early readers of Chinese. In addition, we used a corpus-based measure of surprisal to assess the impact of local word predictability. Eye movement data from 56 Chinese students were collected (a) in the students’ 4th grade and (b) one year later while they were in 5th grade. Results indicated that surprisal and some text similarity measures have a significant impact on the moment-to-moment processing of words in reading. The paper presents an easy-to-use set of tools for linking the low-level aspects of fixation durations to a hierarchy of sentence-level and paragraph-level features that can be computed automatically. The study is the first attempt, as far as we are aware, to track the developmental trajectory of these influences in developing readers across a range of reading abilities. The similarity-based measures described here can be used (a) to provide a measure of reader sensitivity to sentence and paragraph cohesion and (b) to assess specific texts for their suitability for readers of different reading ability levels

Phonology is Fundamental in Skilled Reading

There is controversy about the importance of phonology in skilled reading. Event-related potential (ERP) evidence from the initial moments of visual word recognition indicates that processing sub-lexical phonology is fundamental to skilled reading. The early timecourse of this phonological activation explains the predictive power of phonological awareness for early reading development, affirms the importance of phonological processing in learning to read, and illuminates the persistent challenges of dyslexia

Reading development, dyslexia and phonological skills.

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139825/1/IrishJoPsychPaperOct89.pd

Different Ways of Reading, or Just Making the Right Noises?

What does reading look like? Can learning to read be reduced to the acquisition of a set of isolable skills, or proficiency in reading be equated with the independence of the solitary, silent reader of prose fiction? These conceptions of reading and reading development, which figure strongly in educational policy, may appear to be simple common sense. But both ethnographic data and evidence from literary texts suggest that such paradigms offer, at most, a partial and ahistorical picture of reading. An important dimension, neglected in the dominant paradigms, is the irreducibly social quality of reading practices

Enhancing the Early Literacy Development of Children at Risk for Reading Difficulties

This paper reviews the dynamic and interactive links between the development of children’s language phonological awareness, and reading. Some of the key issues explored are procedures to enhance children’s language development, decoding and word recognition skills, along with some relevant assessment and programming strategies that can facilitate children’s early reading development. In particular, the paper supports the suggestion that deficits in phonological awareness are often a consequence of slow vocabulary development (a classic marker of language delay) and that teachers need to be able to adapt their language and dialogue interactions for children with language delays

Sensitivity to speech rhythm explains individual differences in reading ability independently of phonological awareness

This study considered whether sensitivity to speech rhythm can predict concurrent variance in reading attainment after individual differences in age, vocabulary and phonological awareness have been controlled. Five to six-year-old English-speaking children completed a battery of phonological processing assessments and reading assessments, along with a simple word stress manipulation task. The results showed that performance on the stress manipulation measure predicted a significant amount of variance in reading attainment after age, vocabulary, and phonological processing had been taken into account. These results suggest that stress sensitivity is an important, yet neglected aspect of English-speaking children?s phonological representations, which needs to be incorporated into theoretical accounts of reading development

Vocabulary is important for some, but not all reading skills

Although there is evidence for a close link between the development of oral vocabulary and reading comprehension, less clear is whether oral vocabulary skills relate to the development of word-level reading skills. This study investigated vocabulary and literacy in 81 children of 8-10 years. In regression analyses, vocabulary accounted for unique variance in exception word reading and reading comprehension, but not text reading accuracy, decoding and regular word reading. Consistent with these data, children with poor reading comprehension exhibited oral vocabulary weaknesses and read fewer exception words correctly. These findings demonstrate that oral vocabulary is associated with some, but not all reading skills. Results are discussed in terms of current models of reading development