Prompted by the growing interest in the role of reader-related and text-related variables in reading comprehension, a study compared 30 sixth grade students in regular classrooms to 30 language impaired students. The purpose was to assess the relationship of (1) text structure manipulations for simple and complex sentence structure, (2) discourse…

The papers in this collection represent a wide spectrum of approaches, philosophies, and viewpoints of scholarly endeavor in their treatment of reading theories, research, and processes. The collection begins with an address by the president of the National Reading Conference concerning the tools for reading researchers. The remaining 53 articles…

Two experiments examined the cognitive resources used by readers in sentence modeling (summarizing the propositions in a sentence) as a function of reader task and of sentence complexity. It was predicted that encoding a sentence into memory for later recall would require more cognitive resources than reading a text to answer immediate questions,…

Focusing on talk as the vehicle through which the reading and writing processes can become more interactive and can more closely approach the processes of learning, the lessons presented in this booklet provide examples of how teachers can construct learning strategies to help children "talk their way into meaning" against a framework of…

In order to investigate the text structure/reading comprehension relationship, this paper reviews recent research on text representation theories. Text structure investigation--research on semantic memory as it is concerned with meaning from the word level through the inference level--follows the premise that sentences are understood in the…

The reading recall protocols of 24 tenth grade and 24 twelfth grade students were used in a study that investigated the relationship of average reading ability and high school grade placement to recall of expository text with adversative and attributive structures. Two test passages were written in an adversative structure with contrasting…

The purposes of this paper are to explore the reading process from a psycholinguistic point of view and to discuss some of the implications that may have a direct bearing on children's becoming effective and efficient processors of meaning. The paper first reviews related literature in the following areas: language acquisition before school,…

Presents results of tested theoretical models of the development of print concepts and word reading. Indicates that children expand their knowledge in each of the following print components with age: print, graphic awareness, phonemic awareness, grapheme-phoneme correspondence knowledge, and word reading components. (NKA)

A study investigated whether there were commonalities of cue patterns in six selected tenth grade students' reading and writing that could be discovered from each student's respective language use and perception of the two distinct but interrelated processes. Specifically, the study explored how two above-average readers, two average readers, and…

Certain aspects of the reading process have suggested that second language reading skills are determined to some extent by native language reading skills. Some of this research is reviewed here and an experiment is described in which the reading skills in Spanish and English of three groups of Spanish speakers learning English are compared.…

Research on schema theory in general and its specific application to reading in non-native speakers of English has important implications for the second language classroom. Studies show that readings with an unfamiliar background, including an unfamiliar cultural background, are more difficult to understand. Understanding inferences and…

This paper reviews some of the strategies the receiver uses in the process of comprehending a message in a foreign language and discusses some of the ways in which the listener/reader goes beyond the actual physical form of the message during this process. The role of guessing is discussed in the context of the following theories: the…

Forty bilingual Ss were tested in four experiments to see if decoding of linguistically mixed texts with one-word substitutions in the other language would take more time than decoding of unilingual material. The overall aim was to further explore the nature of the language switch mechanism as it functions in input. In the first experiment,…

Sixty-five grade 5-6 children were tested on a verbal recall task involving material of varying semantic and syntactic content. There was no difference between best and poorest readers in their performance on random lists of words, but there were clear differences on meaningful sentences and on syntactically well-formed but semantically anomalous…

Two key parallels exist between reading and writing, each with profound implications for the teaching of these skills, and which can be adapted for the situation in Japanese high schools, where reading and writing classes are separate. First, on a theoretical level, writing and reading are cognitively similar in that they are both active and…