The authors examined whether relevance instructions compensate for differences in verbal ability on measures of reading time, text recall, and sentence recognition. College students (n = 81) with higher and lower verbal ability were assigned randomly to 1 of 2 relevance-instruction conditions before reading a text. They asked participants in each…

Notes that college students read and later answered questions about information in two sets of four fictitious biographical passages that differed in terms of the presence of thematic connections (with theme or without theme). Explores metacognitive awareness of theme and its relationship to recall, recall prediction, and strategy use. Finds the…

Compares the time required to perform four tasks on the basis of information gleaned from a traditional manual and from a hypertext version of the same manual. Finds that searches in the paper document were significantly faster than those in hypertext. Suggests that direct importation of existing word-processing files into hypertext format is not…

People construct macrostructures to reduce and organize incoming semantic information. When they make a prediction on a paper's outcome based on the work's first sentence or paragraph, readers are using preliminary input to construct a macroproposition about the paper's focus. The macrostructure may be explicitly stated--either in the opening…

The Flesch readability index yields meaningful information about the responses of readers to texts. Because the formula is so simple, a group of English teachers wrote a program in BASIC that would count some obvious surface features of a text and calculate Flesch scores. Among the programing problems encountered were counting words (taking into…

Studies of text comprehension have suggested that readers focus on different levels of ideational unit while reading, thereby affecting the quality of their comprehension of the text. A study examined the viability of the deep-surface categorization with regard to essay-writing and the relation of different approaches to writing to the quality of…

Efficacious features claimed by experts who had rewritten texts were evaluated in 3 experiments involving 700 undergraduates and 52 instructional texts about Army job tasks. Some experts evidently had effective knowledge about improving text, but it was primarily procedural. (SLD)

Papers on linguistics and language teaching in this volume are the following: "The Revision Process in Academic Writing: From Pen and Paper to Word Processor" (Stephen Chadwick, Nigel Bruce); "Sentence Sequence and Coherence: In Search of Readers' Problems in Academic Discourse" (Desmond Allison); "Plural Marking in Hong Kong English" (Carol…

This paper describes one college-level English-as-a-Second-Language teacher's use of error analysis in an effort to understand students' problems with reading comprehension and writing. The research was undertaken in a Japanese junior college. Three studies are presented. In the first, 59 students in a general English course listed sentences they…