This study examined the effects of reading modality (oral vs. silent) on comprehension in elementary school students with a specific learning disability in reading (N = 77). A 2 (development-level) × 2 (reading modality) × 2 (time) mixed factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to determine the influence of these variables on…

Reading comprehension is based on the efficient accomplishment of several cognitive processes at the word, sentence, and text level. To the extent that each of these processes contributes to reading comprehension, it can cause reading difficulties if it is deficient. To identify individual sources of reading difficulties, tools are required that…

Children with reading comprehension difficulties display impaired performance on semantic processing tasks. These impairments are assumed to reflect weaker knowledge about abstract semantic associations between words in poor comprehenders [Nation, K., & Snowling, M. (1999). Developmental differences in sensitivity to semantic relations among good…

A study explored an application of rauding theory to the developmental components that contribute to elementary-age children's reading comprehension. The relationships among cognitive power, auditory accuracy level, pronunciation (word recognition) level, rauding (comprehension) accuracy level, rauding rate (reading rate) level, and rauding…

A study was conducted to determine the role of story grammar in children's ability to detect misplaced information in simple narratives. The subjects, 27 second grade and 25 fifth grade students, each read six stories that had been developed for the study. The stories were one-episode narratives comprised of six grammatical categories with two…

The focus article in this newsletter contains a discussion of the theory of reading as a thinking process and offers practical suggestions for implementing instruction in teaching reading as a thinking process. The section on theory is based on observations of the reading process as perceived by psycholinguists such as Frank Smith and Kenneth…

Working on the hypothesis that if readers had several alternative correct meanings of a given text set before them they would select the one in accordance with their abstract abilities and intellectual maturity, a study investigated the measurement of levels of meaning as illustrated in taxonomies and focused on the applicability of the taxonomies…

This paper reviews approaches to understanding how adolescents of different ages and abilities read and understand literature. The specific examples discussed focus on the contrast between "describer" and "explainer" responses to passages in which literary characters experience sudden and traumatic changes in their lives.…

Samples of forty students at ages twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen participated in a study of adolescents' sensitivity to suddenly changed circumstances of literary characters. Each student answered six questions on each of five passages; for each set, two questions focus on the story itself and four require consideration of consequences of…

Discusses nontext knowledge necessary for reading comprehension. Examines the composition of children's real world knowledge for ordinary situations. (FL)

A developmental study investigated the pictorial and linguistic main idea identification skills of 104 students in second, fifth, and eighth grades. In the pictorial task, the subjects studied a complete picture story and ranked the effectiveness of four separate main idea alternatives at capturing the meaning of the story. Following the same…

A study was undertaken (1) to determine if a relationship existed between preadolescents' levels of reading comprehension as defined by T. C. Barrett's Taxonomy of Reading Comprehension and their levels of moral development according to Lawrence Kohlberg's stage sequence and (2) to discover if females demonstrated higher levels of reading…

Concludes that in virtually all tests involving phonemic processing, poor readers performed significantly worse than did chronological age controls. (FL)

Examines the role of nontext social knowledge on elementary school children and college students' understanding of protagonist-antagonist stories, noting some developmental changes in the understanding of these stories based on knowledge of persuasion. (FL)

A study was conducted to determine if instruction in schematic aspects of narratives would enhance children's knowledge of story constituents and their interrelationships and to assess the effect of instruction in narrative schema on the reading comprehension of average and below average readers. Subjects were 20 fourth grade students who had been…