Carr, Thomas 1985

Carr, Thomas H. 1985.The development of reading skills.New Directions for Child Development Series. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 135 pages. 875897940. Location: Dallas SIL Library 372.4 D489d. Interest level: academic.

"Reading is a complex, skilled performance whose mastery depends on establishing an information-processing system that is partly new and partly old. The old part consists of the integrative cognitive processes by which the information content of spoken language is

• comprehended
• remembered, and used to answer questions, draw inferences, solve problems, and
• carry out other acts of thought.

The new part consists of the perceptual processes by which information is obtained from the printed page and fed into the integrative processes, plus additions or modifications to the integrative processes needed to accommodate differences in form and function between written and spoken language. The new perceptual processes include mechanisms by which printed words can be recognized. They may also include mechanisms by which expectations about upcoming words can be formed and used to aid the mechanisms of word recognition, though this is a hotly debated issue .... The modifications or additions to the integrative processes include the

• knowledge and skills for handling types of information
• syntactic constructions
• rhetorical devices, and
• discourse-organizing techniques that are found much more often in written language than in spoken language" (editor's notes, page 1).

Discusses component skills, underlying abilities, and their many interactions. Presents five chapters and two commentaries on how children become readers of a previously spoken language. Chapters address a wide range of topics which share an underlying theme. Both the new perceptual processes and the modified integrative processes must be acquired eventually.

• Bibliography module: Carr, Thomas 1985
• In overview module: Bibliography (Literacy): C
• In modular book: Bibliography (Literacy), by Doris Gallemore, Trudi C. Hunt, Jeanne Swanson, and Stephen L. Walter
• In document collection: Reference materials
• In bookshelf: Literacy

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 4.0, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 28 June 1999

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