While each English department will establish its own set of assumptions appropriate for its objectives and programs, the new rhetoric can bring some coherence to the teaching of writing and literature by providing students with reliable strategies for reading literature as well as writing. In teaching literature teachers need to demonstrate the…

With practical applications for parents and teachers, this book uses diary entries, tape recordings, and videotapes made by the child's mother from a researcher's perspective to chronicle a child's reading and writing development from birth to age three. The introduction provides an overview of how children learn to talk, read, and write;…

To discover the strategies good and poor readers employ at grades two, three, and four, a case study focused on the oral reading of four students (two good readers and two poor readers) in their second, third, and fourth grade years. Data were examined and interpreted. All four children either increased their ability to make use of cuing systems…

Three experiments, in which subjects read passages of variable readability, measured "cognitive capacity usage" (the attention level to reading material) by recording by subjects reaction times in a secondary task (responding to a "click"). The data indicated that the easy texts filled cognitive capacity more completely than the difficult texts,…

The shift from viewing reading as primarily a perceptual process to viewing it as primarily a linguistic process, combined with the consideration of reading failure as not one but many disabilities, formed the basis for the assumption that there exists a duo-symbiosis between reading and speech and between speech and word-finding. The development…

Descriptions of language learning and reading behaviors are presented, in this paper, within the context of a model of cognitive processing that reflects a continuum for the logical procession of language skills in human maturation and learning. Portions of the paper differentiate silent and oral reading in terms of cognitive load, which is a…

This article reports a study in which fourth graders were tested on their recall of stories they had read. Thrity-two children, divided into two groups of 16 by reading ability, each read two passages and were scored for recall. The passages read were either the original versions of two stories, semantic rewrites (in which anaphoric elements,…

A community college reading/study skills course was designed to progressively introduce the student to the logical elements involved in symbolic processing and to facilitate understanding of the nature of the processes, as well as of impediments to them and of methods that will facilitate maximum efficiency in dealing with written material. The…

A study investigated the extent to which bottom-up and top-down conceptual frameworks of reading were held by primary grades teachers. In the first phase of the study, 66 teachers were given the Theoretical Orientation to Reading Profile (TORP), which was designed to reflect belief systems of reading instruction organized around a continuum from…

This collection provides a number of perspectives on the central role that language plays in reading comprehension. Following an introduction by the editor, entitled "Attention and Individual Differences in Comprehension," the following papers are presented: (1) "The Line of Sight Approach," by Norman H. Mackworth; (2)…

This paper reviews studies on cognitive processes that may mediate the development of early learning problems. Topics covered include auditory and visual discrimination deficits, integration of information from different modalities, the significance of attentional factors, contributions of memory factors, and the importance of cognitive style…

The problem of the panel on semantics, concepts, and culture, sponsored by the National Institute of Education Conference on Studies in Reading, was to determine how lexical, semantic, conceptual, and cultural factors contribute to reading comprehension. The contents of the document include the following: "Word Recognition Skills," which…

The aim of the panel on reading comprehension, sponsored by the National Institute of Education Conference on Studies in Reading, was to determine the influence of intellectual factors, general experiences with the world, knowledge specific to the particular reading task, and general decoding skills to successful reading performance. In addition,…

One of the several causal mechanisms for errors made by adult second language learners is interference from the native language. This paper attempts to account for the cognitive nature of interference by proposing two psycholinguistically based principles that will explain various types of production and perception errors made of second language…

Explores the central thesis of cognitive science that the mind is an information processor. Discusses the study of reading as an opportunity to gain insight into how that processor works. Provides several examples that illustrate some of the relationships between eye movement, short-term memory, and long-term memory. (TW)