The purpose of this study was to describe attempts by nonword readers, novice word readers, and expert word readers to read environmental and functional print items. Eighty-one children aged 3 to 6 years were included in the study. Children were assessed for word-reading ability and letter-naming knowledge. They were then categorized into reader groups based on ability to read preprimer and primer words in isolation. Next, children were shown nine print items and asked, "What can you read here?" Responses were judged for whether they maintained the communication contract by showing an attempt to read. Attempts to read were then judged for whether they included text from the print item, were meaningful, and/or indicated attention to graphic detail. The results revealed that children attempted to read more frequently than they renegotiated the task or refused to respond. Over 75% of the attempts to read were meaningful, more than 35% included text from the print items, and nearly 50% indicated attention to graphic detail. Differences were found between attempts to read a potato chip bag (environmental print item) and attempts to read functional print items. Despite similarities in letter-naming ability, expert word readers and novice word readers differed in their attempts to read and in their attention to graphic detail.Environmental print studies have made several important contributions to the growing body of knowledge related to young children's literacy (McGee, 1986). In general, these studies have shown that children are aware of the meaning potential in environmental print, but use environmental cues rather than graphic or print cues 99

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Two experiments were conducted to explore the efficacy of instruction with third-grade subjects in processing metaphors based on the principles of the direct explicit teaching of reading comprehension and current metaphor theory. In Experiment 1, process instruction was validated. In Experiment 2, process instruction was compared to traditional basal instruction in the context of a unit on metaphor. Statistically significant differences were found in favor of process instruction. The psychological processes involved in metaphorical interpretation are discussed and directions for future research suggested.Metaphor has long been the subject of speculation and research in disciplines as diverse as philosophy, linguistics, literature, and cognitive psychology. The purpose of the present study was to clarify the relationship between the theory and practice of metaphor by employing the tenets of one theory of metaphor, the salience imbalance hypothesis (Ortony, Vondruska, Foss, & Jones, 1985), and the principles underlying the direct explicit teaching of reading comprehension (e.g., Pearson, 1984; Roehler, Duffy, & Meloth, in press) to see if young children could actually be taught to interpret metaphors.According to Ortony et al. (1985), a metaphor is a statement of nonliteral similarity wherein two terms of a disparate nature are compared, that is, the terms are not really alike. What the terms do have in common is some shared attribute(s). For example, in sentence (1) below, television is being compared to cyclops. These two things are not really alike, but they do share two attributes: monstrousness and 325

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