<p> This study is an <i>ex post facto</i> correlational study that analyzed the mediated relationship between <i>everyday adult literacy practices (directions or instructions; letters, memos, or mail; newspapers or magazines; professional journals or publications; books, manuals or reference materials; financial statements; diagrams, maps, or schematics)</i> and <i> literacy scores,</i> using <i>vocabulary scores</i> as the mediator while controlling for <i>educational attainment, current educational practices, age,</i> and <i>number of books at home.</i> This study used the Program of International Assessment of Adult Competency (PIAAC) 2012/2014 public use household dataset which includes data from over 8,000 participants. This dataset contains information about participants&rsquo; background, daily lives, and reading practices as well as literacy, numeracy, and informational technology skills. Analyses were completed using the IDB analyzer to complete regression analyses on the final sample which included 1,599 participants who had taken both the literacy and print vocabulary assessment. The Sobel process was used to determine mediation. According to the Sobel test, the <i>vocabulary score</i> mediated the relationship between <i> reading letters, memos, or mail</i> (b = 4.18, SE = 0.23, <i>p</i> &lt; .001) and <i>newspapers or magazines</i> (b = 2.55, SE = 0.29, <i> p</i> &lt; .05) and the <i>combined plausible literacy score.</i> This showed that a portion of the ability to predict adult literacy scores from the frequency of reading letters, memos, or mail and newspapers or magazines could be due to vocabulary proficiency.</p><p>

The purposes of this study were to identify the metaphoric language that occurs in Mexican elementary school basal readers for the period of 1978-1984, to determine the most common trope in each grade and to determine the trope densities of each grade. There was a need to identify any changes in the number of tropes and in the trope densities that occur between grades in order to develop in the future methods and materials for teaching students to recognize and interpret figurative language. The findings indicate that there was a systematic increase in density between all grade levels except the second and the third grades. Of a total of 2814 tropes, the most common trope was Metaphor which occurred 2277 times and represented 80.9% of all tropes. It included personification which formed 56.4% of all the metaphors, and in which Nature and Animal Life represented 64.2% of the themes. The implications to educators and to bilingual programs are discussed. It is suggested that a reading program encompassing figurative language can increase the knowledge of metaphoric language and can also increase the knowledge of idiomatic speech so necessary for successful communication. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-09, Section: A, page: 2640. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1985.

<p> The effectiveness of an incremental rehearsal intervention with and without self-graphing was assessed using an adapted alternating treatments design for reading fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary knowledge. </p>

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the beliefs and practices of itinerant teachers of deaf and hard of hearing (d/hh) students about literacy development. The study examined the match between the itinerant teachers' beliefs and their practices match and the effects of the itinerant setting on beliefs and practices. These are important questions in the field as so many d/hh students are currently enrolled in public school settings. Five itinerant teachers participated in the study and met the following criteria: spend 70% or more of their time providing itinerant services and who serve two or more elementary schools, provide itinerant services to elementary age d/hh students, have at least five years of teaching experience with two or more years spent as an itinerant, and located within a 150 mile radius of Tucson, Arizona. A series of three interviews and four observations were completed with each teacher. The qualitative analysis program QSR Nudist 4 (2000) was used initially to analyze all of the data from the interviews and observations. This was followed by at least four readings of the original transcripts, once for each research question. Conclusions were drawn and similar patterns, phrases, ideas and themes were labeled and indexed. The teachers believe that d/hh students develop literacy in similar ways to hearing children if they have a strong language base. They also find it valuable to have a broad knowledge of literacy development for hearing children in order to identify gaps that d/hh students might have. The teachers use a combination of service delivery models, pull-out and in-class. The teachers use a combination of meaning-centered and skills-based models and a wide variety of practices for developing literacy. The majority of the teachers' beliefs match their practices. A number of specific effects of the itinerant setting affect the teachers' practices including: support from team members, space, consistency of student sessions, isolation, availability of resources, time, student teacher ratio, ownership of students and programming, and flexibility. Importance of the findings and their implications are discussed.

<p> This qualitative study explored how incorporating picture books into a fourth grade reading program can enhance literacy instruction. Ten fourth grade students read, listened to, and shared twenty selected picture books over a twelve-week period in the classroom setting. The data sources included: observations, conferences, group discussions, student work samples, open ended comprehension assessments, a researcher-generated questionnaire, and a reflective journal. Data analysis using the constant comparative method yielded 38 codes and generated four themes. The themes reflected that picture books: promoted the use of comprehension strategies (visualization, activating background knowledge, determining importance, questioning, inferring, making connections and synthesizing); facilitated the instruction of literary elements; fostered student literary essay writing; and enhanced visual literacy, aesthetic awareness, and reading enjoyment. The study supports Rosenblatt&rsquo;s reader-response theory, whereby multiple interpretations of literature are valued. Implications for the classroom as well as for further research are presented.</p>

The main purpose of the study was to examine the relationship of Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) to cognitive, linguistic, and basic reading skills (word/nonword reading). Concurrent relationships among RAN, Phonological Awareness (PA), Verbal Short-Term Memory (STM), Processing Speed (PS), Letter Knowledge (LK) and Early Reading Skills (READ) were examined in 133 first- and second-grade children. The sample consisted of students who demonstrated a variety of reading skills. Causal models of RAN and Basic Reading skills were developed. The proposed direct and indirect relationships among variables were examined and appropriateness of the path models was tested through path analyses. Path analyses revealed that RAN digits/letters (RAN-DL) and PA were important and independent predictors of READ at each grade level. The findings demonstrated that RAN-DL had an increasingly predictive role in READ, whereas the importance of PA relatively diminished in the second grade. LK had a consistent predictive role in READ in both grades, whereas STM and PS had changing direct and indirect roles in READ in both grades. RAN objects (RAN-OBJ) had no significant role in READ at either grade level. Results indicated that STM and LK made significant contributions to RAN-DL and RAN-OBJ in the first grade; however, PS explained significant variance in only RAN-OBJ. PA did not explain any significant variance in RAN-DL and RAN-OBJ at either grade level. Interestingly, none of these four variables contributed to RAN-DL and RAN-OBJ in the second grade.

The purpose of this study was to examine the discourse of six selected Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA) session transcripts for effective and promising procedures, questions and discussion strategies. Data sources consisted of session transcripts and interviews to determine how the RMA team's discourse accomplished their intended purposes across six RMA sessions with a fourth grade reader. Phases of the analysis included (1) verifying the existing data sets, (2) selecting six RMA sessions from the set of eleven, (3) conducting and analyzing interviews with the RMA team, (4) structural analysis of sessions, (5) speech act analysis of discourse moves, (6) sequential analysis of question cycles, (7) categorization of patterns that emerged in the data. Three broad discourse themes, based on the RMA team's stated purposes for the RMA sessions, guided the categorization of team members' talk: (1) discourse moves providing revaluing, (2) discourse moves providing instruction, and (3) discourse moves encouraging the reader's strategy use. The structural analysis of the RMA sessions generated elements of the instructional sequences and phases that made up each session, and a profile of RMA session procedures. Findings revealed: the RMA team used a wide range of question types to analyze miscues; discourse patterns involved in instruction and revaluing involved a variety of question cycles, position statement and 'you-statements' about the readers' reading strategies; problematic discourse sequences stemmed from problematic questions, responses and belief structures involved in interactions; by analyzing other readers in comparison with his own reading the reader's self-concept increased.

This microethnography focuses on a single arts magnet middle school in a large urban southwest city to describe administrators, teachers, and students understandings of the relationship between art and literacy, how they use art and literacy in content instructional experiences, and how the environment they create supports literacy in two sign systems. The school provided a rich visual environment, an informed group of participants with a stated commitment to the arts and the academics, and a setting where art was supported and valued. Data collection utilized informal interviews with three administrators, twenty-six content area teachers and fourteen sixth, seventh and eight grade students, observations of classroom and the environment at large, and the collection of artifacts which included photographs taken by the students to record their perspectives of how art and literacy were used in their daily lives at school. Relying on a method of constant comparative analysis and data collection carried on concurrently during the study, a triangulated picture of content literacy and the visual arts emerged to reflect the three perspectives of the participants. This study dispels the notion that art is marginal in content literacy activities while advancing the notion that art is a meaning-making activity and essential to development of an aesthetic, literate person. Moreover, this study serves to persuade teachers, reluctant to bring art into their instructional experiences because they do not feel competent as artists, that talent is not a prerequisite nor a relevant concept for those who embrace a semiotic perspective and transmediation as the focus of instruction.

Reading is an area that has concerned educators who work with students who are deaf or hard of hearing for many years. Studies from the 1960s to the present have concluded that students who are deaf read at lower levels than their hearing counterparts. The purpose of this study is to investigate the reading strategies used by students who are deaf, as they comprehend the written text. This study focuses on the strengths of individual students who are deaf, as they realize their potential as efficient readers and writers of a language they cannot hear. Qualitative case study research design initiated and guided this investigation. Through observations, interviews, and miscue analysis, I investigated two students' reading strategies. I was interested in the students' perspectives of their reading strategies, reading strengths, and thoughts about the reading process. Using constant comparative method of reading, organizing, and coding the data, an understanding of the students' reading strategies developed. A significant implication from this study is that students who are deaf use similar reading strategies as students with normal hearing in each of the three reading comprehension categories, predicting, sampling, and confirming. However, findings also and translation of the text from English to ASL, to assist their comprehension. Further research into each of these areas is warranted.

An assumption of the Whole Language model of reading is that self-selected text use is beneficial to students' reading proficiency. This experiment tests that assumption, and broaches a hitherto unexplored aspect of the reading process, namely students' reasons for text selection. The 68 college-level Spanish foreign language students in this study completed two types of reading comprehension tests, multiple choice and retelling tests, which permitted an evaluation of the effects of self-selected vs. assigned text use on reading proficiency. In addition, they responded to two questionnaires. The first, administered during the second week of classes, elicited information about students' demographic characteristics, computer literacy, Spanish experience, and perceived language and reading proficiency. A second, weekly questionnaire asked about the texts students read from the WWW, specifically targeting text topic, sources of prior knowledge about the topic, and reasons for text selection. An analysis of variance found no effect on reading proficiency of the use of self-selected vs. assigned texts. However, students' scores were significantly lower on the posttest than the pretest in both groups, raising the issue of backsliding in reading proficiency. Chi squared tests of independence explored the existence of a relationship between text selection behaviors and reading proficiency level. However, no evidence of a significant relationship was present. Nonetheless, two reasons for text selection predominated for all students: interest in text topic, and perceived appropriateness of the text to the assignment. Prior knowledge of text topic did not play a significant role in text selection, however, indicating that prior knowledge and interest were not related in this study. The results of this study led to two conclusions that can guide researchers in future investigations of the reading process. First, the data suggest that reading is an open-ended process, beginning prior to the reader's first exposure to the text, and having a complex comprehension process that may continue indefinitely. Second, reading is a dynamic process which interweaves diachronic and synchronic factors, including variables which lie beyond the parameters of currently accepted definitions of reading. These perspectives and their interactions provide fertile ground for new areas of research.