The purpose of the study was to describe the process through which young adult students selected their own books and responded to the reading material in a literature classroom. I studied the factors that contribute to understanding adolescents' self-selection methods. I investigated what they chose to read and why. This study serves to inform further instructional research in the young adult selection of literary texts as a way of personalizing reading by tailoring it to their own tastes and interests as young adults. The adolescents in the yearlong study were students in a middle school set in a rural New England town. The sample included 19 seventh grade students and 25 eighth grade students who participated in one 50 minute class each week in which students chose books, read and responded to books, gave talks about books and authors, read aloud from books, discussed book preferences and dislikes and presented literary projects. In order to understand these students' book selection processes, the following aspects were investigated in the study: (1) What these young adults told us about their book selection. That is, how they felt about choosing their books in contrast to being assigned literary material to read. (2) How these adolescents selected books. How they discovered what books appealed to them as well as what made them continue to read a book. (3) What effect these students' interests in reading books had on the selections they made and the responses they made to their reading. (4) How family, peers and teachers influenced these adolescents in the types of books they chose to read. Qualitative research methods were used to collect and analyze data. My role was participant observer each week during the class period and daily in the school halls and library. I kept field notes describing the young people's interaction with books. Data collection consisted of recording what students said and did as they chose and discussed books with their peers and teachers. Dialogue journals were kept to indicate students' responses to the books they were reading. I examined beginning and end-of-the-year questionnaires as well as analyzed the mid-year interview. I looked at a survey given to parents of students in order to investigate the parents' observations and knowledge of their children's involvement with books. Data were also collected from the seventh and the eighth grade teachers and media specialist who kept their own journals, took part in interviews and met regularly with me to discuss students' book selections. Results indicated that more than half the students preferred selecting their own books rather than have teachers choose for them. The adolescents became cognizant of the ways that they selected books from a diverse collection that the teachers had available for them. We heard the testimony of the adolescents voicing their tastes in books as well as the reasons why these texts interested them. The teenagers revealed that they shared books and interests with a variety of people including parents, siblings, extended family, peers, and friends. An integral part of the self-selection program was the student/teacher interaction around books in response journals and conversation about literature that was personally appealing and satisfying.

The primary goals of this dissertation is to examine some of the effects of a read aloud program on the attitudes toward reading and the English reading comprehension of Spanish-speaking children in the primary grades. The first chapter provides the historical background of teaching methods in English as a second language. The chapter describes the unsteady relationship between the techniques developed for foreign and/or first language teaching and second language learning. This study poses the question of whether reading aloud, a technique widely used in English monolingual classrooms, can be transferred to the second language classroom where the conceptual, experiential, and linguistic background of the English as a second language learner is so profoundly different from that of the English monolingual learner. The effects of this transference on the second language learner's reading ability and the attitudes toward reading constitute the focus of the study. The second chapter reviews the literature in the areas of reading and bilingualism, reading aloud, and reading attitudes. The review points out two significant findings. First, it reveals that there is very little cogent research available on the topic of reading and bilingualism. Second, the literature available on reading aloud and the measurement of reading attitudes was found to focus almost exclusively on English monolingual learners rather than on second language learners. The third chapter describes the research plan, which follows an experimental design using a control group, pre- and post-testing, and t-test analysis of the responses of fifty-three Spanish-speaking students enrolled in a bilingual elementary program. The tests used were the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test, a standardized measure, and an attitude measure adapted by the researcher. A teacher's observation checklist was also used to record students' responses to the readings. The findings of the study presented in Chapter IV a briefly summarized as follows: (1) A positive trend supporting the use of reading aloud in the ESL classroom was observed, although the findings were not statistically significant. (2) Teacher observations indicate that individual reading selections stimulated increased verbal and nonverbal student interaction during the read aloud sessions. Chapter V offers a summary of the study, the conclusions, and the recommendations for applications of the findings, improvement of the study, and possible further research.

This study reconstructed the world of five children, aged 19 months to 24 months at the beginning of the study, coming to literacy in a day care center over a three and a half year period. This study utilized the ethnographic methods of participant observation, in-depth interviewing, informal casual interviewing and conversations, audiotaping and videotaping. The respective parents, teachers and the Center Director were formally and informally interviewed. Addressing the questions how do children become literate and how do significant others directly and indirectly socialize children to literacy this study suggests several points. First, teachers were culture bearers who consciously and unconsciously organized a supportive literacy environment that developed out of their particular cultural orientation in which literacy was taken for granted. Second, meaning making occurred in an interactive collaboration between the children and the teacher. Third, teachers modeled literacy behaviors for the children and in turn the children learned these behaviors and demonstrated them for their peers. Fourth, as children learned more literacy knowledge they became more capable in the meaning making process by themselves. Fifth, the events of literacy learning were most influenced by the mutual social relationships among the children. Children served as models, supports and partners for their peers in the meaning making process. Children learned literacy from interacting with adults and other children, talking and writing with adults and other children, from books that were read to them and that they read, and from the demonstrations and support of their teachers and peers. Sixth, much learning went on in the crevices of classroom life and this learning was not directed by the teachers. Seventh, group circle reading was initially used to socialize the children to the extra-literate rules for group participation. This study identified key dimensions that this particular social group provided for their children. The findings in this ethnography cannot be approached as universal, but instead are culture specific. This ethnography offers ways of looking, thinking, and talking about early socialization to literacy.

Thirty Hispanic second graders enrolled in regular (as opposed to bilingual) classrooms were administered the Spanish and English versions of the LAS and the Reading Miscue Inventory. The study was guided by questions related to the subjects' oral language proficiency and its relationship to their reading proficiency. It was found that the great majority of the subjects were fluent speakers of prestige dialects of English. Further, the majority of the children were found to be non-Spanish-speaking. Fourteen of the fifteen more proficient readers were speakers of the prestige dialects of English. The only LAS subscale which emerged as a predictor of the subjects' RMI reading levels was Subscale V, reflecting the subjects' syntax, vocabulary, and oral fluency. Finally, in almost 50% of the instances, teacher judgment differed from the RMI judgment in terms of the Hispanic beginning readers' reading proficiency. Each of the findings suggested a topic which would be well-considered through future research efforts.

Dyslexia is a clinical diagnosis often associated with phonological processing deficits. There are, however, other areas of concern, such as the presence of auditory temporal processing (ATP) disorders. One method of investigating ATP is the gap detection (GD) paradigm. This study investigated GD performance using the Gaps-in-Noise© (GIN) test in three groups of 30 children, aged 8 to 9 years. GD thresholds and gap identification scores (%) were determined for each participant. The three groups of participants included (Group I) children with dyslexia and phonological deficits, (Group II) children with dyslexia and no significant phonological deficits, and (Group III) normal reading peers. Repeated-measures ANOVA showed that GD thresholds for the three groups were significantly different. Group I showed longer GD thresholds (RE, 8.5 msec; LE, 8 msec), than did Group II (4.9 msec for both ears) or Group III (RE, 4.2 msec; LE, 4.3 msec). Close inspection of the threshold values for the three groups revealed that the thresholds for Group II overlapped substantially with those of Group III, but not with those of Group I. Similar trends were also noted for the gap identification analysis. From a clinical perspective, the majority of participants in Group II and all participants in Group III performed within normal limits on both measures (i.e., thresholds and identifications), while performance of participants in Group I fell below established norms on these measures. Finally, additional analyses revealed that ATP was highly correlated with phonological processing measures indicating a relationship between the presence of phonological deficits and ATP deficits. This study confirmed that ATP deficit is a factor to be considered in dyslexia and suggested that the GIN© test is a promising clinical tool that should be incorporated in the evaluation procedures for children with reading difficulties.

Researchers have discovered that native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) of Mandarin Chinese use different strategies in recalling visual-based texts. Since written Chinese can be represented in logograph, syllabary, and alphabet, it is important to know how and to what extent a representational system (RS) will affect the processing of Chinese texts by both NSs and NNSs. The two surveys in this study explored the effects of RSs on text processing by NSs and NNSs of Chinese. Native groups consisted of subjects from Taiwan and China and were asked in the first survey to match Chinese vocabulary items in pinyin and in characters to their closest English equivalents in meaning. Subjects in the second survey, which included two native and one non-native groups, identified Chinese syllables in either pinyin or zhuyin version, discriminated the differences of sounds of identical characters, and chose the right words to fit in the phrase-level contexts. Two conceptual hypotheses were proposed and tested: (1) NSs of Chinese will demonstrate better performance than NNSs in comprehending texts represented in Chinese characters, and (2) NNSs of Chinese will demonstrate better performances than NSs in comprehending texts represented in pinyin in terms of accuracy and speed. The findings show that (1) Beginning and intermediate non-native learners of Mandarin Chinese benefited from alphabetic representation of the Chinese language in terms of processing speed and accuracy rate--requiring less time and achieving higher performances; and (2) Native Chinese who learned either zhuyin or pinyin as a primer demonstrated lower performances in processing texts represented in either zhuyin or pinyin in terms of speed and accuracy. The findings suggest that logographic representation might provide more rapid and precise access than syllabic and alphabetical representations for text processing at the advanced level. One particular pattern is apparent: An RS which is more efficient at the beginning level will become less efficient at the advanced level and vice versa. This implies that instructors should teach both RSs, logographic plus syllabic or alphabetic systems, to beginning readers, and switch to logographic representation once the learning of the two systems become balanced.

The study was designed to investigate the effects of a parent intervention training program and its impact on reading achievement at the third grade level. Parents of grade three students in a suburban community west of Boston, Massachusetts were trained to use specific reading strategies to tutor their own children. The study attempted to show what would result when parents were trained as tutors to deliver specific oral reading strategies such as: (a) correcting miscues only when they disrupt meaning and after waiting for the child to self-correct; (b) using sustaining cues to encourage the child to use context to identify words; and (c) praising the child for self-correcting and using context. Parents participated in three training sessions that lasted approximately two hours each. Learning materials used were distributed at these meetings. As a screening procedure and to provide a standardized measure of instructional levels (pre-test and post-test) the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test Level 3, Forms K and L, were administered to students in the parent intervention group and to their classmates as control subjects. Students whose parents participated in the parent intervention training program showed significantly more gain in reading scores than did their classmates (t = 13.50, P $<$.05). A second phase of the study involved using a thirty-item questionnaire to survey about one hundred parents of third grade students to identify their attitudes about parental involvement. Parents indicated that it was the responsibility of the school to help parents to increase students' reading achievement. They also wanted the school system to continue to provide programs to meet the needs of students at all levels of learning ability and to put more effort into this goal. The findings in this study suggest that a parent involvement program using individually prescribed, meaning focused activities for teaching reading was an effective means of improving reading comprehension skills of third grade students.

Research in the area of beginning reading has given educators both, the knowledge of the critical foundational skills that comprise reading, and the tools to assess such skills early to prevent the development of reading problems. The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) are a series of brief measures that can be used to identify children who are at risk of developing reading problems as soon as they enter school. In this era of high stakes testing and accountability, educators must ensure that students are on their way to become proficient readers, well in advance of third grade when standardized tests are typically administered. In the interest of prevention and early intervention, authors of the DIBELS provide a timeline and recommended benchmarks to guide instruction and intervention. This study examines the diagnostic accuracy of DIBELS to predict oral reading fluency using author recommended cut-scores and alternative cut-scores identified as a result of Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis. The accuracy of the DIBELS was assessed across the range of all possible cut-scores in an effort to maximize desirable test characteristics such as sensitivity, specificity, predictive power, or more broadly, decision validity. A sample of 122 students were administered the DIBELS measures in kindergarten and the middle of first grade, followed by oral reading fluency at the end of first grade. Analysis of decision accuracy indicated that the DIBELS measures are highly sensitive in identifying students who are at risk of developing reading problems; however, this occurred at the expense of an inordinate number of false positives. This has important implications for the utility of the DIBELS as a decision-making tool. In an effort to maximize the accuracy of the DIBELS, ROC curves were generated and alternative cut-scores were identified which improved specificity, predictive power, and the percentage of correct classifications.

Treatment integrity has always had a presence in research, but now more than ever must become a priority owing to the changes in Special Education Law. The present study intends to explore the relationship between factors of implementation, treatment integrity of intervention implementation, and reading fluency. Participants included students in grades 2 through 5 and their teachers enrolled in an urban elementary school in the southwest area of the United States. Participants were chosen for possible inclusion on the basis of their fall performance relative to oral reading fluency on a universal screening measure used as part of the district’s Response to Intervention (RTI) plan. Classroom teachers were observed implementing reading interventions and asked to respond to surveys aimed at summarizing their opinions regarding factors related to choice of intervention and implementation. Path analysis was conducted to explore the relationship between two factors of implementation (intervention complexity and acceptability), treatment integrity (adherence to intervention protocol) and student outcomes (oral reading fluency scores). It was hypothesized that low scores for intervention complexity would be inversely related to levels of treatment integrity, which would subsequently be positively related to reading fluency. Moreover, it was hypothesized that intervention acceptability and treatment integrity would be positively related, which would subsequently be positively related to reading fluency. Lastly, it was hypothesized that there would be an inverse relationship between intervention complexity and reading fluency, and a positive relationship between intervention acceptability and reading fluency. Results indicated an inverse relationship between intervention complexity and treatment integrity, suggesting that when complexity was low, treatment integrity was high. A positive relationship was found between intervention acceptability and treatment integrity, suggesting that when acceptability was high, treatment integrity was high. Furthermore, when treatment integrity was high, reading fluency scores were found to be high. An inverse relationship was found between complexity and reading fluency, suggesting that when complexity was low, reading fluency scores were high. Lastly, a positive relationship was found between acceptability and reading fluency, suggesting that when acceptability was high, reading fluency scores were high.

Service delivery and the access to specialized instructions to consumers, encounters many barriers within the profession of speech-language pathology. This state of affairs is largely due to the disparate distribution of speech language services (ASHA, 2005). This restricted access, or an inability to access services, is a result of a number of factors, which include lack of clinicians, insufficient number of facilities in geographic area, and transportation issues (ASHA, 2004e). As a result, students who require specialized reading instruction are not afforded the opportunity to access the necessary treatment. It is essential that the literacy needs of all children be addressed, including those who require specialized instruction (Foorman & Torgesen, 2001; Allington, 1994). Technology, specifically telepractice, is a potential solution to address this dilemma. The purpose of this study is to investigate the reliability and validity of systematic multisensory reading treatment for students who have been identified with a delay in foundational reading skills, addressing foundational reading skills via an internet-based video conferencing system. The results will establish the groundwork for the efficacy, reliability, and validity of internet-based video conferencing as a means of service delivery for foundational reading skills. The foundational reading skills targeted in this study are letter naming knowledge (LNK), letter sound knowledge (LSN) and decoding.