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)

Concludes that on an immediate recall test, fourth-grade students taught with a graphic organizer strategy for facilitating comprehension recalled significantly more idea units in a test passage than did students who had not received such instruction, but there were no performance differences between the two groups on a one-month delayed recall…

Researchers measured how much thinking time teachers allowed third grade readers of various ability levels when responding to questions. Teachers allowed more time for thinking after text-based questions, although scriptal questions usually required higher-level thinking and, consequently, more time. (Author/PP)

Reviews three alternative cognitive approaches for verbal comprehension. Discusses a theory of learning from context and cites empirical data to support the theory. Presents a componential framework for understanding verbal comprehension and suggests that the ability to acquire information from context is a key source of individual differences in…

Indicates that college students make use of word length and shape information to decode text and that the context of a passage affects students' knowledge of the syntactic structure and semantic content of that passage. (AEA)

Explains how education majors try to learn to recognize thought unit sentences (ThUS's) and to gauge their difficulty. Shows examples of simple writing and discusses the task of writing ThUS's to match style and level of author. Gives a rationale for doing a readability analysis in this way. (FL)

The construct validity of reading comprehension test items was studied in a two-stage process. Five characteristics of task difficulty were defined and a heterogeneous set of 52 items were rated for these characteristics. Then correlations were obtained between ratings and item difficulty data. (CTM)

Argues that television, when used as a secondary activity, interferes with performance on otherwise intellectually demanding tasks. Examines performance on seven different cognitive processing tests for respondents in four television-viewing conditions and a no-TV control group. Finds significant performance decrements for measures of reading…

Researchers examined student listening and reading performance to determine weaknesses in listening and reading comprehension, questioning whether performances of students with such problems suggest differences in processing strategies. Results showed significant between-group listening and reading differences. Using listening to measure optimal…

In 2 experiments involving a total of 43 college students, adages (relational metaphors) were found to facilitate processing of general ideas and higher-order principles. The higher the degree of structural relations embedded in the titles of passages, the greater the recall and accessibility of system-related ideas. (SLD)