This book focuses on appropriate English for Academic Purposes instructional concepts and methods in the Japanese context. It investigates a variety of pedagogical techniques, addressing the fundamental academic English skills -- listening, speaking, reading and writing -- as well as assessment and materials development. All the research included…

A study examined the effects of within domain processing on the recall of idea units as well as the potential reversals in performance resulting from the passing of time. Subjects for the experiment were 89 undergraduate students randomly assigned to six conditions related to target words in a reading passage: counting e's, determining the…

Four experiments examined the "distinctiveness of encoding" hypothesis with respect to recall of text materials. Specifically, they investigated: (1) recall of distinctively versus nondistinctively encoded material; (2) readers' interactions with the semantic base of the text; (3) encoding and recall of semantic content; and (4) the role…

Notes that, according to dual-route models of reading, consistency effects in pseudoword reading are evidence for the activation of lexical information. Investigates whether lexical interference has a semantic or non-semantic origin. Provides evidence for the existence of a lexical non-semantic pathway in reading aloud among a group of Italian…

A study examined the effect of variation in category dominance on retrieval latencies (and errors) from semantic memory. Subjects, 66 students enrolled in an introductory psychology course, were required to perform 6 successive retrievals from each of 18 conceptual categories. The six retrievals consisted of two successive blocks of three from…

Using a lexical decision task, the effects of frequency and number of meanings show that different patterns of results emerge for fast and slow readers. For fast readers there are general effects of both frequency and numbers of meanings; for slow readers the effects are considerably attenuated. (Author/CM)

Eye movement data were collected for 28 college students reading 32 sentences with sentence verification questions. The factors observed were target sentence voice (active/passive), probe voice, and correct response (true/false). Pairs of subjects received the same set of stimuli, but with agents and objects in the sentences reversed. As expected,…

Two experiments examined the roles of semantic and surface information in reading and recognizing sentences. Results indicate that reading and recognition are interactive processes, involving conceptually driven and data driven operations; the interaction may be either automatic or controlled. Semantic and surface information are conceptualized as…

Two experiments are presented to clarify the relationships among different information codes available to a fluent reader and the utilization of syntactic and semantic knowledge to facilitate word identification. Use of context is measured with a word boundary task on passages with either coherent or random organization. Orthographic pattern and…

Examines coherence between sentences in a paragraph, arguing that readers require coherence at this level as well as between paragraphs. Discusses continuative and discontinuative relationships between sentences, including (1) sequence, (2) exemplification, (3) addition, (4) replacement, (5) contrast, and (6) alternation. (HTH)

College undergraduates participated in a cost/benefit analysis and a speed/accuracy analysis of semantic priming in a lexical decision task. In both studies, half the cues were neutral and half were words from 30 semantic categories. Word targets were the category names, and nonword targets were derived from those names. The cue-word was valid 80%…

Asserts that teachers should help students move beyond an information-exchange view of reading to a more complex rhetorical model of constructing meaning. Reports on a study which investigated meaning constructions and compares the more traditional function/feature strategies of constructing meaning with rhetorical strategies, which construct…

Twenty college students, ten each in the experimental and control groups, were the subjects of an experiment designed to demonstrate that integration of verb meanings occurs in connected discourse. Six paragraph-length stories, each of which included one or two critical sentences containing a general verb, were presented orally to the subjects.…

This study attempted to elucidate the effects of context and level of processing on comprehension and memory for prose. Two aspects of memory for prose were investigated: the amount of information remembered and the semantic interpretation assigned to ambiguous paragraphs. Task instructions and exposure duration of the passages were manipulated to…

Investigates the degree to which children and adult readers use semantic and syntactic information sources to increase speed of word recognition and to increase speed of determining sentence meaningfulness. Finds three developmental differences in the speed of analyzing these sentences for words/nonwords versus meaningfulness/nonmeaningfulness.…