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A Study Of East Tennessee Regional Phonology: Its Influence On Reading Performance, Margaret B. Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

The purposes of this study were to analyze the pronunciation of pupils and teachers to determine the deviation from the expected pronunciation for each group, and to determine the influence of dialect on reading performance of pupils. A random selection of twenty first grade, third-generation pupils and twenty elementary, second-generation teachers from four small, rural, all-white elementary schools in Sevier County, Tennessee were interviewed with the use of an instrument which the investigator developed from an arbitrary selection of one-hundred-sixty-two pictorial words. These words were teaching examples for the eighteen vowels and diphthongs that are taught as phoneme-grapheme correspondences in …

The Development Of Scales To Measure Attitudes Towards Reading, Betty Sue Heathington

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument or instruments to measure the attitudes toward reading of children in grades one through six. Criteria were established for such an instrument. The Likert-type scale was chosen as the most appropriate type of instrument to meet the established criteria.

Two rural schools and two urban schools with normally distributed populations according to ability and socioeconomic levels were used in the study. Pilot work, consisting of individual interviews with children in grades one through six, was conducted to explore the area of reading attitudes and to obtain statements suitable for the …