Scientific Studies of Reading · 2004 · 61 citations · 26 references
EducationInstructionLiteracy EducationReading ComprehensionReading DevelopmentReading EducationDecoding SkillsLexical DevelopmentReadingReading AcquisitionReading InstructionReading ProcessesBeginning Reading InstructionChildren's Text ReadabilityGrammatical Complexity Of InputRelational Database SystemsSyntactic FeaturesSyntactic KnowledgeSyntactic SophisticationText Difficulty Analysis
Abstract California and Texas mandate 75% to 80% decodable texts for first-grade reading programs, yet these percentages have no empirical base. This study examines the text selections in 6 first-grade programs from the perspective of lexical, semantic, and syntactic features. The composition of text differed across the 6 programs with respect to length, grammatical complexity, the number of unique and total words, repetition of words, and coverage of important vocabulary. Potential decoding accuracy rates, as computed by a relational database program created for this project, varied widely across the 6 programs and often depended heavily on holistically taught words. Moreover, the majority of words appeared only once in each 6-week instructional block across the year. Implications are discussed for (a) learning to read from basals, (b) design of basal reading programs, and (c) future research.
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How Psychological Science Informs the Teaching of Reading
Keith Rayner, Barbara R. Foorman, Charles A. Perfetti et al. · Gothic.net · 2001 · 926 citations