The process of acquiring knowledge from texts is considered from two perspectives: the learning of the individual facts in the text, and the integration of the facts into a coherent representation reflecting relations among the facts. The former process is presumed to depend on the linguistics content of the text, while the latter process depends…

To investigate the applicability of schema-theoretic notions to young children's comprehension of textually explicit and inferrable information, slightly above-average second grade readers with strong and weak schemata for knowledge about spiders read a passage about spiders and answered wh-questions tapping both explicitly stated information and…

The effects of content schemata, embodying the reader's existing knowledge about a topic, on reading comprehension were examined in two experiments in which high school and college students were instructed to take a distinctive point of view while reading and recalling a story. Perspectives assigned before reading, shortly after reading, and long…

The relationship between writing and reading processes can be analyzed from several contextual perspectives. The contextual perspectives may be linguistic, social, schematic, or strategic. While the writer follows several steps in getting meaning into print, the reader may not be able to reverse perfectly these steps and get meaning from print.…

Standardized reading tests exert a great influence on curriculum materials, teaching methods, and student perceptions of the nature of reading; these tests must reflect the best recent research findings. Passage dependency research has attempted to increase the accuracy of reading tests, and has focused on the following four areas: (1) reading…

Morse code signals were presented dichotically to Morse code operators and to naive subjects with no knowledge of Morse code. The operators showed right ear superiority, indicating left hemisphere dominance for the perception of dichotically presented Morse code letters. Naive subjects showed the same right ear superiority when presented with a…

This paper focuses on four studies of pupils' reading comprehension completed at the University of Alberta. A number of investigators have described the acquisition and use of connectives by pupils and have indicated the importance of connectives in the development of abstract logical thinking. (Teachers often consider these words too simple to…

The idea of semantic features has taken some force within psychology and a number of research workers have suggested that semantic acquisition is, in some manner, determined by semantic components. This notion has come to be called the "semantic feature hypothesis". An examination of the semantic feature hypothesis was made by testing 80…

Describes how a learning strategies approach can enable learning disabled students in secondary schools to study effectively, using as an example the acquisition of specific information from reading a chapter in a science text. (JC)

Describes research done to determine whether there is a statistical relationship between an English as a second language learner's ability to determine a word's morphemes or structural units and his/her ability to comprehend written English text. (SED)

Explores the role of interpersonal cognitive complexity in the character impressions, story comprehension, response preferences, and literary attitudes of eleventh grade students. Results suggest that interpersonal cognitive complexity predisposes readers toward complex perceptions of literary characters. (HOD)

Discusses the emerging assumptions of literature and its teaching that knowledge is made and must be remade by each person. Considers the relationships between the reader and the text, the reader and the reader, and the relationship between texts. (EL)

Provides a number of ways teachers can use newspapers to teach comprehension and critical thinking and to help students develop sensitivity in awareness of the self, the community, the nation, and the world. (FL)

Investigates the development of children's metacognitive knowledge about reading, its relationship to reading performance, and the influence of using two different interviewing techniques for eliciting information about reading. (FL)

Suggests that self-reported story climax imagery is related to deeper levels of processing on reading comprehension measures that do not rely disproportionately on verbal reasoning processes. (AEA)