A commonly held belief among educators, researchers, and students is that high-quality texts are easier to read than low-quality texts, as they contain more engaging narrative and story-like elements. Interestingly, these assumptions have typically failed to be supported by the literature on writing. Previous research suggests that higher quality…

Designed to investigate the types of responses given to a sentence completion task when constraint elements of word order, word form, redundancy, distance between lexical items, and the interaction among these elements are considered, this instrument consists of 34 sentences, half of which are high associative sentences, while the other half are…

Designed to assess comprehension of written ambiguous and polysemous structures, this instrument is a series of written statements that include varying degrees and types of ambiguity. In the first part of the test students are asked to identify (from a choice of three) semantically acceptable paraphrases for an initial sentence. Then students must…

Designed to assess listening ability and to indicate implications for listening instruction, this instrument comes in a full and an abbreviated form. The 45 multiple choice items on the full form measure 53 specific listening skills in five categories: (1) simple recall, (2) recognizing and following spoken directions, (3) recognizing a speaker's…

Designed to assess listeners' comprehension of ambiguous and polysemous utterances, this instrument is a series of 24 statements that include varying degrees and types of ambiguity. Subjects listen to prerecorded audio tapes of these statements, presented in a neutral tone that provides no stress or pitch cues to aid "disambiguation."…

Designed to determine a reader's ability in processing information relationships in written discourse in English, the extended-cloze instrument consists of six reading passages, each with four complete sentences deleted. Students read each passage and select the best of four multiple choice alternative sentences for each deletion. The instrument…