Provides research findings that paint a bleak picture of the functional reading competence of aged persons. Supports previous research indicating that functional reading competence decreases with age. (JT)

This study was designed to explore the sensitivity of children to orthographic structure, particularly across two grade levels and between two levels of reading ability within each grade. (HOD)

The primary research question in this study was whether good and poor readers differ in their use of orthographic and contextual information available in printed text. (HOD)

Argues that differences in instruction influence differences in students' reading abilities as much as do variations in individual learning styles or aptitudes. Suggests ideas for enhancing instruction of poor readers. (RH)

Educable mentally retarded (EMR) children were presented an item selection task to assess their sensitivity to orthographic structure in printed English words. Analyses of performance indicated that EMR children do acquire implicit knowledge of orthographic rules and that this ability is related to the development of reading skills. (Author)

The study, involving 12 poor and 12 good fourth grade readers, tested the effects of context on the identification of high-frequency words. (BD)

Elderly persons (N=90) were tested for their reading ability and 126 documents from seven service agencies were analyzed for their readability. Results indicated two-thirds of the sample had reading abilities lower than eighth grade, whereas 98 percent of the documents had readability levels at or above ninth grade. (Author)

Teacher verbal behaviors following oral reading errors of primary grade children were the focus of this study. The incidence, location, and type of verbal interruption behaviors that occured during classroom reading instruction were contrasted for high-and low-ability readers. Results for 20 teachers indicated that they were more likely to…

This study attempted to assess the relationship between misreading of high-frequency words and utilization of semantic and syntactic cue systems. A 250-word passage from a second-grade basal reader was altered in two ways: in one condition, the sentences were randomly ordered, and, in the other, the words were randomly ordered. Twenty-four fourth…

Teacher logs for 600 reading group sessions from grades 1, 3, and 5 were analyzed to identify whether the amount and mode of assigned contextual reading differed systematically between "good" and "poor" reading groups. Analyses indicated that groups comprised of good readers read more total words and more words silently than…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether good and poor readers of the same age levels differed in their performance on a task which required the integration of semantic-syntactic and grapho-phonic information. Fifteen fourth grade good readers, 15 fourth grade poor readers, and 15 second grade good readers read six sentences that had one…