Paula J. Schwanenflugel - US grants

In the past few years, the way in which simple word and sentence contexts influence the processing of upcoming words during reading has come increasingly to be understood. However, more needs to be understood about the way in which these fairly local context effects are interrelated and combined with other information from paragraphs. This research is designed to elucidate how readers combine distant paragraph information with local sentence information in reading upcoming words in text. Specifically, the research will examine potential changes that may occur in word reading when expectations for particular words derived on the basis of local sentence information are contradicted by information embedded more distantly in the paragraph. The research will address several points: First, it will clarify whether paragraph information is continuallly combined with local information or whether effects from distant sources operate independently from local sources in the processing of upcoming words in text. Second, the research will examine the degree to which the predictability of local information affects how that distant information is used in reading words. Last, the research will assess whether this distant information has its influence at the point at which the upcoming word is recognized or only later when the meaning of the word is integrated with the meaning of the text. The information gained from this work will be useful in the development of guidelines for designing highly readable texts.

DESCRIPTION (Adapted from Applicant's Abstract): Being able to read fluently is a critical developmental step in all young children's education. Reading fluency is necessary for learning from science and social studies texts in later grades. The objectives of the proposal is to investigate the development of fluency and automaticity in early elementary school reading. The research will refine existing programs for the development of fluent reading in classrooms and remedial reading settings. The study has three goals: (a) to develop and validate pedagogical approaches to developing reading fluency, specifically repeated reading and wide reading approaches; (b) to determine the effectiveness of approaches to providing remedial support for low-achieving children including decoding instruction, speeded word identification strategies, and repeated reading strategies; (c) to develop an empirically-based model of the development of fluency in beginning readers, particularly obligatoriness, speed, and resource availability aspects of fluent reading. Strand 1 will train classroom teachers in Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (Stahl, Heubach, & Cramond, 1997) and Wide Reading approaches in their classrooms in schools in Atlanta, Rural Georgia, and New Jersey. The development of fluency in children in these classrooms will be measured through standardized and experimental methods both immediately following the intervention and a year later, and these children will be compared to the development of fluency in children receiving a traditional reading instruction. Effective methods will be implemented and disseminated. Strand 2 will examine remedial aspects of reading instruction designed to promote the development of fluent and automatic reading in struggling readers. This strand will examine the effectiveness of both Phonological and Strategy Training, Speeded Word Retrieval, and Repeated Reading strategies, both singly and in combination. The effectiveness of these will be compared to a traditional remedial instruction control. Both immediate and long term follow-up measures, on both standardized achievement and experimental measures, will be conducted to follow the progress of these children. Strand 3 will examine how the aspects associated with automatic reading: obligatoriness, speed, and resource availability change together during the development of fluent reading during the second grade. Both a cross-sectional and two-year longitudinal study are planned. By examining all of these aspects together in a single longitudinal study, a richer description and theoretical base for the development of fluent reading skill will be obtained. This strand will also develop the experimental measures of reading fluency to be used in the other strands, The research conducted will add valuable knowledge regarding the ways to foster fluent automatic reading in young elementary school children.