What can a teacher, faced by the problem of helping immigrant second-language pupils in his or her class, learn from recent research? One important research project has made us aware of the sort of obstacles which books, as well as classroom talk, are throwing in the path of the immigrant ...

Ages, Stages, Classes, Years, Grades, and Systems compared

To read well and widely is a central objective of formal education. People who cannot read are seen to be at a crippling disadvantage, personally, educationally, and vocationally. Public concern is often expressed about standards of reading attainment.

When things go wrong with a child's social behaviour, teachers, psychologists and social workers frequently ask for the parents' help. When children are disruptive in class, when children are repeatedly late for school, when children seem upset or withdrawn, parents are asked to suggest possible causes, to try out new ...

Most teachers assess reading comprehension by asking questions. These questions may be very broad, such as 'What was the story about?' or else very detailed, listed on a worksheet perhaps. Yet why do we ask the kinds of questions we do? How much story understanding do they really get at ...

Legibility research has been going on for two hundred years and it has discovered some useful pointers for anyone who is writing down words, or selecting words, to be put in front of anyone learning.
When a book designer is at work his trade, called typography, is an art: but ...

Most children begin school expecting to learn to read. If this expectation is not met, if they have problems with reading, they may develop a dislike for reading, or just a hopeless feeling about it. The reading problem and the poor attitude to it aggravate each other, and this can ...

Subscribe, or better still have the school subscribe, to one of the half dozen or more journals devoted to reading. But be aware: some journals specialise in one area of reading or specialise in research studies rather than articles dealing with the teaching or improvement of reading. The following notes ...

A fable

Voluntary individual tuition for adults with acute problems in reading, writing and spelling is not new. It has always gone on quietly for a few people in a scattered and isolated way. What has changed in the 1970 s is that New Zealanders are starting to realise the scale of ...