No description available.

No description available.

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.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Memphis, 2009. / Typescript. "May 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-76).

Undergraduate honors paper--Mount Holyoke College, 2005. Dept. of Psychology. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-136).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2010 Aug 16.