The readings in this collection were prepared to accompany a report of a series of experiments conducted to determine what information readers, both skilled adults and children beginning to read, use when they read to understand a story. Titles of the readings are are (1) "Oral Reading: Does It Reflect Decoding or Comprehension?" (2)…

Overviews of schema theory, which focuses on the cognitive operations engaged in by the reader, and discourse analysis, which focuses on structural characteristics of the text itself, are presented in this paper. The first section explains the notion of cognitive schemata (patterns of expectations that are applied to incoming information) and…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 24 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the influence of additional supportive context upon the reader's ability to identify the main idea of a paragraph; effects of metaphors and paraphrases as…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 31 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) teaching strategies for reading comprehension; (2) strategies for assigning meaning to unfamiliar words in context; (3) differential processing of explicit and…

This introduction to the pedagogy of reading comprehension in a second language focuses on learning strategies appropriate to achieving reading competence. Lexical strategies can be fostered by tolerating local errors and encouraging practice in the identification of specific features such as tense, part of speech, and cognation. Tasks that…

As part of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, a study was devised to test the project's materials and procedures. Selected by a pretest, four kindergarten children, with no prior reading instruction, were taught the same reading content using the initial teaching alphabet for a…

As part of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, the second phase of a preliminary study was devised that modified the pretest, the instructional modes and format, the sequence and amount of information presented in the instructional sessions, and the procedures for testing and…

School characteristics associated with reading achievement and characteristics of low achievers in reading are examined in separate articles in this report. The first article begins with a review of the literature on school effects, arguing that there are school variables that show consistent associations with achievement, when the structure and…

Ideas to be understood and to be remembered must be organized. To organize ideas the reader must recognize the relationship of the parts of the ideas, to one another and to the whole. The reader with no orderly set of the ideas presented on the printed page cannot carry on a dialogue with the author and profit from the reading experience. What did…

This volume suggests not only that the reading process is more complex than previously assumed but that, like so many other cognitive and linguistic skills, the richness and depth of the complexity increase the more closely it is examined. Each chapter focuses upon various aspects of the reading process and provides for possible innovations and…

Three experiments use a tachistoscopic word recognition task to investigate how skilled readers covert visual input into a speech-related or phonological code during reading. (Author/NCR)

Four experiments examined the spelling capability of students in grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, and college. Results suggested that reading unit size increases with age and reading ability. Younger children, like adults, unitize common words, and unitization of less common words increases as word configurations become more familiar. (RWB)

The article provides an overview of a special topical issue on information processing as it relates to learning disabilities. Components of information processing theory are described, a model of information processing is presented, and subsequent articles in the special issue are summarized. (JW)

Multiple reading measures and writing measures were administered to 256 second graders and 251 fifth graders. A canonical correlational analysis, grade level analyses, and cohort analyses for beginning and proficient readers were performed. Reading or writing never explained more than 43 percent of the variance in the opposite test set. (Author/BS)

Analyzes the task performance of two groups of readers--those who made gains and those who did not make gains in a remedial reading situation in order to determine their use of word identification cues. Shows that the gain group was more analytical of the test words and tended to use more units of varying size. (HOD)