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This paper argues that the standards for reporting and interpreting educational research should be raised. It suggests the need for a higher standard is urgent in fields such as beginning reading, in which public interest is intense, because findings can quickly become distorted or misinterpreted and enshrined through misinformed policy decisions. The paper argues that researchers investigating beginning reading should exercise extra caution to delimit findings from their own studies and should take special pains to shows how studies contribute to a larger picture of literacy development which policy makers and educational leaders, in turn, need to consider. The paper examines B.R. Foorman, D.J. Francis, J.M. Fletcher, C. Schatschneider, and P. Mehta's "The Role of Instruction in Learning to Read: Preventing Reading Failure in At-Risk Children" (1998), a recent, and uncommonly influential, reading methods study as an "example of research that has been overly promoted by the media and misused by some policy makers and educational leaders to support a simple solution to the complex problem of raising the literacy of young children in high poverty neighborhoods." Contains a figure and 93 references. (EF)

A study investigated properties of children's naturally occurring arguments. The arguments were sampled from transcripts of 20 discussions held in 4 fourth-grade classrooms. The principal findings were that children's arguments are filled with seemingly vague referring expressions; that the arguments sometimes do not contain explicit conclusions; and that the arguments almost never contain explicit warrants to authorize conclusions. However, the missing or obliquely identified information usually is given in the text or preceding discussion or is a commonplace from everyday life and readily inferable by actively cooperative participants in the discussion. Children seldom back their arguments by appealing to general principles, except when the foundation for the argument is disputed or seems confusing. At a more general level, findings suggest that it is possible to give a coherent account of children's arguments within the framework of informal deductivism augmented with speech act theory. (Contains 27 references, 1 note, and 1 table of data.) (Author/RS)

A total of 292 Chinese children in the first, third, or fifth grade in Beijing, China, participated in one of two experiments investigating radical awareness; that is, the knowledge that a component of most Chinese characters, called the radical, usually provides information about a character's meaning. The technique was to present two-character words familiar from oral language but which the children had not seen before in print. One of the characters was written in Pinyin, the alphabetic system that every Chinese child learns in the first two months of first grade. The children's task was to select a character to replace the Pinyin. The first experiment showed that third graders and fifth graders are able to select characters containing the correct radicals even when the characters as a whole are unfamiliar to them, which must mean that they are aware of the relationship between a radical and the meaning of a character. The second experiment showed that children are better able to use radicals to derive the meanings of new characters when the radicals are familiar and the conceptual difficulty of the words is low. Children rated by their teachers as high in verbal ability display more awareness of radicals than children rated lower in verbal ability. (Contains 28 references, 5 tables of data, and ANOVA summaries for each of the experiments.) (Author/RS)

Defining metalinguistic awareness as the ability to reflect on and manipulate the structural features of language, this article examines the hypothesis that the metalinguistic demands of learning to read are shaped by the structure of a language and its associated writing system. The article examines the relationship between phonemic awareness and alphabetic literacy, for example in English, and the role of metalinguistic awareness and non-alphabetic literacy, for example, in Chinese. The ways that bilingualism increases certain aspects of metalinguistic awareness are also examined. The article concludes by noting an instructional implication of the metalinguistic hypothesis: that it is the youngest, least advantaged, least able children who will benefit most from instruction that helps them become aware of the structure of their writing system and its relationship to their spoken language. Contains 16 references. (Author/SR)

This study examined a social-organizational hypothesis that explains how silent reading in small-group lessons might influence students' learning. One hundred children in four third-grade classes, each divided into three ability groups, received two silent and two oral reading lessons. Group dynamics were measured from videotapes of the lessons. Students' learning was measured from story recall and passage and word reading. Results showed that positive effects of silent reading were mediated by student attention and teacher-student discussion; students were more attentive during silent reading than they were during oral reading and they reinstated more story information in discussion. However, there was no net benefit of silent reading on learning. The reason was the blank, unproductive time when students had to wait for others to finish reading before discussion could resume. This slowed the pace of the lessons and seemed to offset benefits accruing from attention and discussion. These results are consistent with the social-organizational hypothesis that positive effects of silent reading are socially constructed. Benefits of silent reading may be realized only if teachers organize their lessons to make best use of available time and adapt their instruction to capitalize on students' increased attention during silent reading and their responsiveness to story content during discussion. (Seven figures and 24 tables of data are included; 97 references are attached.) (Author)

A study was conducted to examine the data collected by previous researchers on the degree of helpfulness of natural contexts. In this study two schemes of context cue types were compared on the basis of their contribution to word meaning acquisition, and their relationship to other text and word properties was explored. Subjects were 352 children (third, fifth, and seventh graders) who had served as subjects in previous research. All texts were taken from grade-level books and were classified as easy or hard texts based on judgments of how familiar the topic was for each group. There were two narrative texts and two expository texts assigned to each grade level. From each text, the most difficult words were selected as target words. Each context cue category was analyzed by two judges and each target word was analyzed in two ways. Although there were no significant main effects, the results indicated that strength and explicitness of cues interacted significantly with other text and word factors. Findings imply that the relevant question might not be whether presence and strength of such cues contribute to word learning from context, but instead, what the conditions are under which a reader would be more likely to utilize any cues present to infer the meaning of an unknown word. (Four figures and 12 tables of data are included and 19 references are attached.) (MG)

A two-tiered scaffolding model can be used to explain the complex and critical relationships between the teaching and learning of teachers and the students they teach. The first tier of scaffolding is a teacher, or someone else who qualifies as a more capable other, providing support for a student. The second tier depicts the support necessary to assist an adult in supporting a child in a manner consistent with the method located on the first tier. The two-tiered scaffold illustrates the integral, interactive relationship between the processes used to prepare experts and the method used to teach novices. Reading Recovery, a supplemental program for first-grade children who are at risk of reading failure, can be seen as an instantiation of Vygotsky's theoretical framework and illustrates the two-tiered scaffolding model. (Twenty-seven references are attached.) (Author/SR)

A study sought to replicate and extend previous research which found that an emphasis on meaning in reading leads to better recall of lesson material than does an emphasis on accurate oral reading, and that the child who is taking an active turn recalls more of the lesson material than do the children who are following along. Six third-grade classes (149 children) received 2 lessons in which the teaching emphasis was on global story meaning and 2 lessons in which the teaching emphasis was on surface features of language. The study demonstrated that an emphasis on story meaning leads to superior performance on an array of outcome measures, especially for children in low and average reading groups. The study confirmed that children taking an active turn reading aloud and answering the teacher's questions, particularly children whose reading fluency is low, learn more at these moments. The study found that the average ability of a reading group, especially average group fluency, is more strongly related to outcome measures than are the abilities of individual members of the group. The study showed that the importance and density of information on a page and the serial position of the page, but not its readability, are associated with outcomes. (Six figures and 14 tables of data are included, and 52 references are attached.) (Author/SR)