Understanding and Teaching Reading

In the words of Aldous Huxley, "Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting." Few people question the value of reading; in fact, most extol its virtues. As our culture becomes more complex, reading plays an increasingly greater role in satisfying personal needs and in promoting social awareness and growth. In the last 20 years, the teaching of this invaluable skill has focused so intensely on comprehension and prediction from context that it has lost sight of the significance of automaticity and fluency in the word-identification process. Reading is a synthesis of word recognition and comprehension; thus, this text is about these basic processes and their integration. A common plea from teachers today is that research and psychology be translated into teaching behavior. Therefore, the aim of this book is twofold: one, to identify, report, organize, and discuss those bits of data, research and theory that are most relevant to the teacher's understanding of the reading process; and two, to help educators to interpret and apply theory and research data to everyday classroom teaching, as well as to the problems encountered frequently in developmental and remedial teaching.

Emerald Dechant

Contents: Part I:The Reading Process.Introduction to the Reading Process: A Definition of Reading. Part II:Correlates of Reading Achievement and of Reading Failure.The Sensory Nature of the Reading Process. Reading: A Memory Process, A Perceptual-Cognitive Process, A Linguistic and Communicative Process. Part III:Basic Strategies in Reading.The Schema Model of Reading. Developing the Predictive Strategy in Reading: Integration of the Meaning and Within-Word Cues. Part IV:Organizing and Structuring The Reading Lesson.Introducing Children to Reading: The Language Experience Story, Basal Readers, Trade Books, Expository Texts, Individualized Reading, Whole Language, and Literature-Based Reading. Programming the Reading Lesson: Using a Modified Directed-Reading Activity. Part V:The Word Identification and Word Recognition Process.Developing Instant Recognition of Letters and Words: Using the Integrated Reading Method. Development of Grapheme/Phoneme Correspondence Knowledge and of the Stuctural or Morphemic Analysis Skills. Part VI:The Comprehension Process.Lexical Access and Semantic Encoding: Strategies for the Development of Meaning for Individual Words. Assembly and Integration of Propositions and Text Modeling: Strategies for the Development of Meaning for Units of Increasing Size: Phrases, Sentences, Paragraphs, and TotalText. Strategies for the Development of Higher Levels of Comprehending.