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.

The purposes of the study were to describe how ten infants who ranged from five to thirteen months old responded to books in a day care setting over a five month period, to explore how teachers supported and/or constrained infants' response behaviors, and to understand teachers' and parents' beliefs about infants' capabilities to respond to books. The qualitative methods of participant-observation, formal and informal interviews, written field notes, audiotapes, videotapes, and photography were used for data collection. The results indicated that the infants were able to respond to books through facial expressions, body movements, and verbal responses. They were active in initiating book reading, and were able to show their book preferences. They tended to look for familiar objects and details in illustrations rather than pay attention to the whole content. After being exposed to book reading events, these infants developed positive attitude and skills toward reading. Gradually, book reading events were no longer solely controlled by the teachers, it became joint teacher-infant participation. The results showed that teachers supported infants' book reading in various ways. They made books accessible to the infants, and respected infants' different levels of interest in books. Through scaffolding and language extension, they provided a framework to allow infants to be involved in interactions during book reading. Meanwhile, teachers also encountered various constraints when engaging infants in book reading in a day care setting. The data also revealed that the parents exposed their infants to books at a very early age with various purposes. They made conscious efforts to make book reading enjoyable experiences for their children. Both parents and teachers perceived book reading as an important activity for infants and believed in infants' capabilities to respond to books. This study further elaborated implications for day care teachers and parents which build on its findings.

The present study investigates whether consonant and vowel information make different contributions at the early stage of visual word recognition. In linguistics, the distinction between consonants and vowels has been formalized in the modern theory of phonology, which assumes separate representation and processing of consonants and vowels (e.g., Clements & Keyser, 1983; Durand, 1990; Goldsmith, 1990). In cognitive psychology, such a distinction has been suggested generally in the notion of “islands of reliability”, regarding consonant information as more reliable backbones of word processing at the early stage (Carr & Pollatsek, 1995; Perfetti & McCutchen, 1992; Brown & Besner, 1987). This notion has been more specifically formulated in the two cycles model of phonology assembly (Berent and Perfetti, 1995). The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relative contribution of consonants and vowels in word recognition in silent reading through two different experimental paradigms. In the missing letter paradigm used in Experiments 1 and 2, fixation times on a word during reading were examined as a function of the condition and duration of the missing letter. If consonants have an earlier advantage over vowels in word processing, then missing a consonant should yield a greater cost (i.e., longer fixation times) than missing a vowel. In the fast priming paradigm used in Experiment 3, the relation of the prime and target words was manipulated in terms of consonant and vowel similarity. The consonant-vowel distinction was then estimated in the different priming effects as a function of prime-target relation. The results from the three experiments in this dissertation, in line with the findings of Berent and Perfetti (1995), strongly indicate that there is a clear temporal distinction between consonants and vowels in their contribution to word identification in normal reading. Consonants plays a more important role than vowels in the early stage of word processing. This was demonstrated in Experiments 1 and 2 by the longer fixation time on the target word when the consonant was missing than when the vowel was missing for a brief duration (30 ms) from the onset of the word, and was demonstrated in Experiment 3 by the shorter fixation time on the target word when the prime word was more similar to the target word in terms of consonant similarity than in terms of vowel similarity at the 30 ms prime duration. Further, the results from Experiment 3 suggest that lexicality plays a significant role in the consonant-vowel distinction: the early consonant-vowel distinction was observed only when the prime was a high frequency word.

Previous research has found that when a word like “clam” is presented at the foveal level, its transposed-letter neighbor “calm” is also activated. This activation of multiple lexical candidates causes interference in naming and lexical decision tasks. Here, four eye-tracking experiments were conducted to explore the nature of transposed-letter (TL) neighborhood effects within the context of normal silent reading. Experiments 1 and 2 addressed the processing of target words that have a transposed-letter neighbor (e.g., angel, angle) in comparison to target words that do not have a transposed-letter neighbor (e.g., alien, slope ). Furthermore, Experiment 2 manipulated the sentence context leading up to the target word to explore whether semantic constraints can attenuate neighborhood interference effects. The results indicated that readers do take longer to process words that have a TL neighbor than words that do not have a TL neighbor. This interference effect, however, disappeared when the beginning of the sentence was constraining such that only one of the two members of the TL pair was likely. While both Experiments 1 and 2 explored effects at the foveal level, Experiments 3 and 4 explored the parafoveal processing of transposed-letter neighbors by employing an eye-movement-contingent boundary change paradigm. In Experiment 3, readers received a parafoveal preview of a TL target word that was either (1) identical to the target word (e.g., calm as the preview of calm), (2) a TL-neighbor (e.g., clam) or (3) a substituted-letter (SL) control (e.g., chem). In Experiment 4, a further set of parafoveal preview conditions was explored. Across both experiments, readers' fixation durations on the target words were significantly longer when the parafoveal previews were substituted-letter nonwords than when they were TL neighbors, suggesting that TL neighbors (when presented in the parafovea) facilitate word recognition, rather than inhibit processing. Collectively, these experiments indicate that TL neighborhood interference effects do occur in normal silent reading, but these effects occur late and are influenced by sentence constraints.

The purpose of the study was to determine whether or not elementary classroom teachers’ exploration of an integrated theoretical model of formative assessment would change participants’ understandings of formative assessment and whether or not participants would apply this newly-acquired knowledge to their classroom assessment practices. After exploring elements of formative assessment in a collaborative study group, participants applied new understandings to their classroom assessment practices. The model of formative assessment explored by the study group included these elements: the articulation of clear learning outcomes, the alignment of instruction and assessment to learning outcomes; the providing of feedback to students and using feedback to plan future instruction; and the involvement of students in classroom assessment practices. Previous research on formative assessment has demonstrated the importance of individual elements of formative assessment. This case study provided teachers with an integrated theoretical model that included all of the elements of formative assessment identified in the research literature and used this model as the basis for professional development to change teachers’ classroom practice. Data were gathered through surveys, study group transcripts, participant reflections, classroom observations, interviews with students and documents from individual classrooms. Data were analyzed using a constant comparative method in an effort to identify categories and themes that emerged for changes in teachers’ understandings and classroom practices for each of the elements of formative assessment. Results of the study indicate that the collaborative study group changed teachers’ understandings of the elements of formative assessment, the important relationships among the elements and the teachers’ classroom formative assessment practices. The collaborative study group also provided participants with a supportive environment in which to share their experiences as they attempted to implement new assessment practices in their classrooms.

A theory is presented to explain the reading patterns found among dyslexics through a single process of encoding representations binding phonology and orthography of units of varying numbers of letters within the lexical repertoire. Dyslexia is explained as a function of lack of clarity in the phonological input, resulting in more tenuously bound orthographical-phonological representations. With extensive exposure to the proper phonological input such bound representations can be formed, but the process is very effortful compared to that among unimpaired readers. In order to demonstrate this claim it is necessary to show that errors among dyslexics occur more frequently in low-frequency words, that more sound-related errors are made, that substitution errors are phonetically close to the proper sounds and that the LATAS intervention, which involves memorization of lists of words, would cause the word parts contained on the memorized lists to have correspondingly fewer errors when they are contained in words read by the individuals than other, non-practiced word parts. The paper proposes ways in which to test these claims.